Hi David,

Sorry to hear about your laptop. Even worse is hearing that you lost some of your work. That is always heartbreaking!

I tried exactly the same thing with VirtualBox on a Linux netbook. In the end I just had to accept that the DirectX emulation in VirtualBox is too immature to run MoI. Instead, I managed to install Windows XP on a USB stick and booted from there. More trouble than it was worth really but it did work. I think though that installing Windows in another partition on your Linux box is a better option.

The Ocean Sim and that 'Dynamic Paint' build are both very interesting additions to the new Blender. I'm also thinking about taking another look at Terragen and a first look at Mojoworld. Povray also seems to have come a long way since I last tried it.

So many interesting possibilities.