Migrating Paltalk to a jailed Virtual Machine emulation with Xubuntu and Virtualbox

Every few months I would get complaints from my mom about how slow her computer ran. How it was freezing and dropping the internet connection. Every few months I would find a slew of Trojans and random spyware on the computer. Her Norton Anti Virus license expired so I installed AVG. Things were ok again.

Few months later she called me again. She said the computer was incredibly slow again. I found a "slick" piece of spyware this time by the name of Antivirus Pro 2009. This program would pretend it was a legitimate anti virus and firewall tool. It had hijacked her internet connection. It would notify the user of a detected virus it found and would demand $$$ to remove it. AVG didn't catch it and SpyBot had no luck with it either. This was the final straw for me. I was going to reformat her computer and install Ubuntu instead.

The only issue was that she is part of the Paltalk community. Palltalk is a chat client which she uses to talk to all her friends with. Palltalk provides moderated channels where people can play their music to their friends. It has a very large community. Palltalk is a windows only program though and I was in for a surprise of how challenging this was going to be. I dedicated a day to rebuild her computer and I was off.

Computer specs:
512 Mb RAM
3000 Sempron AMD processor
Onboard video card with shared ram

I stripped one of my old machines and bumped the computer to 1Gb of RAM and plugged in an ATI Radeon 9600 AGP video card I had laying around.

I used a 16Gb thumb drive to back up her documents and music. Burned a disk with the latest version of Xubuntu 8.10. Reason I chose Xubuntu over Ubuntu is it's small memory footprint, being that I needed it to run on an older computer.

Xubuntu install was flawless. Everything worked perfectly without any tweaking. Video, sound and the wireless card worked out of the box. This was definitely the easiest install of an operating system I've ever experienced!

I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and installed Flash. Tried going to Paltalk Express, the sound notifications worked but there was an issue with the streaming audio. I discovered that this was due to missing Java support for Firefox. I got Java working in Mozilla but there was still no sound in Paltalk Express. Java sound worked in my browser when going to other Java applets with sound but no such luck in Paltalk Express. I experimented with aoss as well but had no luck. No matter what I tried I could not get Java sound streaming to work.

Paltalk express had a nasty bug as well. Every once in a while when I tried to load it, the Firefox would never finish loading but would memory leak till the computer started to crawl. In order to fix the issue I would have to kill firefox, go to Flash Settings and delete the locally stored data and try again. This is the point at which I abandoned the idea of using Paltalk Express.

Next thing to try was Wine. Wine is a an amazing piece of software that has served me well so many times before. I even managed to get Eve-Online going trough wine in the past which is amazing considering that Eve-Online client is way more advanced then a Paltalk client. Paltalk client under Wine would log in to the service but as soon as I attempted to join a room it would freeze. I found there was a .dll missing, and after a few hours of trying different things it was clear I wasn't going to have much luck with getting Paltalk working under wine. I almost think the folks at Paltalk purposely worked to prevent Paltalk from ever working on anything other then Windows. In retrospect I think it didn't work because Paltalk depends on Internet Explorer to display all it's annoying ads, as I was getting tired I decided to give up on Palltalk under Wine.

It was time to give virtual machines a go. I've used Vmware four years ago and had generally good luck with it but I needed to use Open Source alternatives. I've tried QEMU first but Windows XP install hung towards the end.

Virtualbox was next. Install worked perfectly. I had Windows XP running flawlessly inside of Xubuntu. Paltalk client was installed and working without any issues. Windows XP was working great as a guest system with 256Mb allocated to it in Virtualbox settings. And I instructed my mom not to use Windows for anything else other then Paltalk.

Windows XP performed great trough Virtualbox emulation, considering Virtualbox is a processor emulator and the Sempron 3000 does not support AMD-V technology.

On the Xubuntu side I installed Songbird (iTunes clone) as well as Catfish for fast finding of her music. And I shared her music folder with the Windows XP guest. I also installed Tkmixer as it allows her to easily switch between mic or line as a sound input source.

Installing Virtualbox guest additions was a bit problematic. In guest window Devices -> Install Guest Additions.. the download link was broken. I went to http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.4/ and downloaded it manually. And then placed it in the right location for the "Install Guest Additions.." to work.

After I was done I made a backup of her Virtualbox windows xp image (.vdi file). If anything should happen with her Windows XP system due to a virus infection or similar it will be a matter of rewriting the active .vdi file from the backup copy. A fix which requires 5 minutes of my time and which can be accomplished remotely.

She has been very happy with Xubuntu. It took some getting used to but she quickly learned her way around it. The computer performed much better as well according to her. Due to both the hardware upgrades I did as well as the lack of unnecessary software running on the machine.