Virtualization.

[swestrup]

I've been thinking about virtualization all day as I've waited for various bits of important state to finish being copied off of the partition I'm going to format.

So, its beginning to seem like a worthwhile thing to try is to install Linux as a host operating system, install VirtualBox, and then install Windows XP on top of that. Since it won't be the native OS, I'll have snapshots I can fall back to if my Windows XP gets corrupted again.

I've decided on having some Linux as my Host OS because:

1. I think the performance penalty for running on top of Linux would be smaller than for running on top of Windows.
2. I can install a 64-bit Linux, which may gain me some speed, but would defintely gain me a 64-bit environment for testing my code in.
3. Linux is more resistant to viral attack, so if I end up using the Host system for work, I'm less likely to infect it somehow.

So, do folks agree/disagree with my points above? And if it IS a good idea to use a Linux as my Host system, which ones do folks recommend? I've had such uniform bad experiences with Live distros so far, that I don't trust my judgement as to which ones I should try a real install with.

Comments

[cloquewerk.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a nonvirtual Windows installation in a couple years now. I run Ubuntu (which I recommend) and I have Win XP in a VM (via VMware server). It's a bit slow to resume a suspended session, but once up it runs QuickBooks, Visual Studio 2003, and older games (like Civ III) pretty decently. I have a P4 2.8 GHz with a gig of RAM (half of which is configured to be used by my VM, when it's up).

I would totally recommend this setup for anyone who doesn't absolutely have to use Windows most of the time. It's debatable if you would still use Windows more than, say, 50% of the time, but it also depends on how fast your machine is.

[swestrup]

Well, I'm runing on a 2.2GHZ Core2 Duo with 2GB Ram, so I should be okay with my current hardware.

I am wondering if I should give Ubuntu another shot. I liked it at first on my Toshiba laptop, but I found that each upgrade broke as many working programs as it fixed broken ones...

[cloquewerk.livejournal.com]

Yeah I've definitely had upgrade problems before, but they seem to occur with any distro that gives you a reasonable amount of freedom. Haven't had any issues in a while though, and I've never had any problems I couldn't fix. I've found the user forums to be extremely helpful. Generally when you get an upgrade problem you aren't the first.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

QuickBooks? Which version? That's one of two programs I have to have that have to have Windog.

[cloquewerk.livejournal.com]

2008. I have 2009 as well but haven't I installed it yet. Can let you know when I confirm that it works.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

That would be great if you could let me know.

How do you already have 2009? I'm a certified QB ProAdvisor and I haven't gotten my copy yet.

[cloquewerk.livejournal.com]

Yeah I got a copy quite a while ago--a couple months at least. I'm still figuring out how Quickbooks works (or, more generally, how bookkeeping works) so I haven't bothered upgrading yet. Should probably do that soon though...

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

Probably a good idea to upgrade soon. 2008 was a major change, so 2009 should have many of the bugs worked out.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

That's the nice thing about virtualization: unless the program needs a huge amount of processor power, or is trying to use the 3D card or some other particularly interesting bit of hardware, it just won't notice that it's running in a virtual machine. It just thinks that it's running on a somewhat older, slower machine.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

How about RAM, does it eat up RAM? If not, I might want to try installing QB and my professional tax software. If that works I can thumb my nose at MS.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Well, sort of. There are two fundamental problems. First, you need some extra RAM just because you're running two operating systems. But the main problem is you do kind of have to decide which machine gets what RAM. If all you're doing is running QB though, that's close to a best-case scenario. You can check how much RAM QB uses, give Windows that much plus a bit more, and it'll work out about the same. You just have to shut down Windows when you close QB in order to really free it up.

Of course, these days RAM is on the astonishingly cheap side, so it may well be worth your time to get a bit more if it'll end up saving you time.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

QB can be a bit of a memory hog and so can the tax software and I often have to run them at the same time. I wonder how much extra RAM I can fit in this machine.

[sps.livejournal.com]

I'm currently trying to get the new work laptop to run either XP Pro or Vista 32 (I don't really care; it's just to launch Outlook) under Virtual Box under Ubuntu. The problem seems to be that Windows won't register. But aside from that, which I'm still working on, it seems pretty slick - especially in 'seamless' mode - I get to have Gnome bars top and right and a Windows bar at the bottom of the same screen, and aside from slight oddities about focus policy and the occasional strange clipping of an oversize menu (which isn't going to be a big deal for me since Outlook is a fullscreenish app), it looks pretty good.

But of course your moose may do something inappropriate, and I have no long term experience to report on.

Debian

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

I use Debian testing. Packages arrive in Debian sid, age a while, and when they are deemed ready, they move into testing. Every two years or so, they make a copy (so to speak) of testing and call that a stable release. The main advantage of stable is that it doesn't change much, except that every two years or so it's a brutal upgrade.

Testing changes continually; there's rarely any big problem upgrading -- small incremental changes are there for the downloading every day or so.

There is no Debian live CD as far as I know. You download a recent Debian install disk (I recommend you use the one for testing), burn, and boot. It helps a lot to read the on-line installation instructions first. It also helps to have someone by your side that's done it before. There's little point in getting an complete set of Debian CDs or DVDs. The most necessary packages are on the install image; the most popular ones are on the first CD or two, and once you have any kind of running Debian (I recommend starting with a minimal one -- I often don't even install X initially), it's convenient to download packages when needed, using the package manager.

There's several package managers; I use aptitude. It keeps track of which packages you actually asked for, and distinguishes them from the ones installed because other packages needed them. It's clever enough to remove the automatically fetched ones when they're no longer needed.

Every six months, so I'm told, Ubunto takes a copy of Debian sid, and spends six months debugging it After doing this for six months, they call it an Ubuntu release and start over again with a new copy of sid.

I've only once had an upgrade failure with Debian. That was when they made the transition from Xfree to Xorg (because Xfree had changed to a nonfree license), and within a month, Xorg switched from an old file layout to a new, modular one. AND, as if that was not enough, they introduced udev, and udev had intimate relations with specific kernel versions. What a mess!

Keep your /home in a separate partition. It makes reinstallation a lot easier
if you should ever need to do it.

All in all, I've had more happiness from Debian than from any of the other Linux distributions I've tried. I've gone through slackware, suse, redhat, mandrake, and ended up at Debian, where I've stayed.

You have a 64-bit machine? Then you get to choose a 64- or 32-bit Linux. There a re a number of applications (primarily proprietary) that have a lot of bugs when run in 64-bit mode. Bad programming, probably, but without the source no one do anything about it.

In particular, I've encountered problems with Flash, and occasionally there are incompatibilities between the latest kernel and the nvidia 3D drivers.
I don't need 3D on my 64-bit machine, and I use the free nv drivers instead.

-- hendrik

Re: Debian

[swestrup]

I had already considered Debian, and discarded it as an option. I went to their website today with one simple question "What do I need to install Debian, and what's the procedure?"

After an hour I gave up in disgust. If they can't even provide the simplest installation information in a format that a software professional can follow, I do NOT want to install their distro.

Re: Debian

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

I am completely baffled. After reading this note, I went to http://www.debian.org, and found the sidebar heading "Getting Debian", which had about four subentries, "CD vondors", "CD ISO images", "Network install", and "Pre-installed".

I follow the main link here, "Getting Debian", and see an emtire page of different ways to get our own copy of Debian. The first of the options says,

Download a small image file, record it to a CD/DVD/USB disk/floppy, and install using the Internet.
These small netinst images can be downloaded quickly. These allow you to download only those Debian packages that you actually want, but require an Internet connection on the machine being installed.

The first sentence of this is a link to a page describing the downloadable image files. On the bottom of this page, and on the page linked to, are links to the installation guide. The installation guide comes in versions for a variety of architectures, and a variety of languages.

I'd really like to know how you could have missed this.

-- hendrik

Re: Debian

[swestrup]

I didn't miss it. But when I went to the download location to download the files, I couldn't match up the file names to the installation types and nothing matched the install guide I had read.

Re: Debian

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

It sounds as if it's time to log a bug report against the web site. Let me look into how to do this.

Just where were you looking? For which files?

I just looked at the page Installing Debian GNU/Linux via the Internet", and the small CD's section contains a list of platform names for images of about 180MB in size. The i386 link downloads a file called debian-40r5-i386-netinst.iso. The amd-64 link offers debian-40r5-ia64-netinst.iso

You must have been looking elsewhere, I'd like to report the contents of that page as a bug.

Or have I misunderstood again?

-- hendrik

Re: Debian

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.... that 40r5 is Debian etch. Etch is the current official release, so I guess that's why those ISO images are there.

Lenny is going to be the next official release; I wonder where to find it.

(google)

I found Release candidates for lenny on http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

But it's also possible to do a minimal etch install, and immediately upgrade to lenny before doing the full install.

-- hendrik

Re: Debian

[swestrup]

I didn't see any of the .iso's you mentioned, but then again I was trying to download the 64- bit version of debian.

Re: Debian

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

the 64- bit version of debian.

Likje the one under the AND64 button? Forget about IA64 -- that's Itanium, Intel's own 64-bit system.

Re: Debian

[swestrup]

Yes, the links under one of the (several) AMD64 buttons. Although I did go to the IA64 links first. Its certainly not obvious that the Intel Core2 chips will be supported by AMD64 distros.

Re: Debian

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

And I'm serious about reporting a bug against the documentation. If it can lead someone as competent as you astray, it's seriously in need of fixing.
I never had problems with it when I first installed Debian half a decade ago, so something must have gone wring in the meantime.

-- hendrik.

Re: Debian

[swestrup]

Well, I can help try to reproduce my failure to find what I needed, after I have my system working again. Right now its quite difficult for me to do any surfing.

Re: Debian

[swestrup]

I've now gone back for a second look. What went wrong for me is to try and download an internet install image. Basically I wanted a tiny download I could burn to CD or USB stick, and boot from it to download only the packages I needed.

Thats the part of the install process that appears to be badly laid out and explained, and where the downloadable files don't seem to match the options given.

If I try to just download an install DVD, everything is simple and obvious, as it should be. So that's what I'm now doing.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I didn't know your main machine was so fast. That should make life much more bearable. But yeah, point 1 might not be all that strong (I'm sure VMware just grabs low-level access right away for all its important work) but otherwise it all sounds very sensible.

As for which distribution to use, I'm currently using Ubuntu, and am not stunningly impressed. 8.04 kind of mangled sound for me, and 8.10 apparently didn't fix it much. I'm only sticking with it out of laziness; I haven't even upgraded to 8.10. I used to use Debian, and while having all those packages was nice, I never got all that comfortable with any of their versions. Stable got out of date pretty quickly, unstable was, well, unstable, and testing was usually both out of date and unstable, and, at the time, didn't get timely security updates. And both Debian and Ubuntu's kernel teams always drove me batty. At one point I managed to boot a standard Debian stable kernel on very boring hardware, and have it not recognize my PS/2 keyboard. Fail.

If I was faced with a blank hard drive right now, I'd have to think hard about which of Fedora or OpenSuse to try. Now, not having actually tried either, maybe they both suck, conceivably more than Debian or Ubuntu. But Fedora actually has a competent kernel team, and OpenSuse has apparently figured out how to put a halfway usable system together without a horrifying mess under the hood. And if you want to use KDE, OpenSuse is apparently by far the best way to go.

For reference, when I had to pick a server distribution a few years ago, I went with CentOS, which is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the stable boring non-desktop version of Fedora, mainly because of their sane kernel and nice security features. But OpenSuse wasn't so well polished at the time, and I didn't have to worry about any desktop junk.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

VMWare ESX installs a cut-down Linux system as a host. I'd take that as a vote of confidence for Linux as a host. I'm pretty sure it's Redhat-derived, though that might be a corporate rather than technical requirement.

[pythonian.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, my experience with running Linux was *as* a VM running in Virtual Box on top of Vista. I can, however, give you my impression of how the Linux box ran.

For the record, my system is an Intel core 2 duo running at 2.13 GHz with 4 GB of RAM.

Ubuntu - when it works - is very good. The interface is clean, the included apps stable and fast. The problems are the upgrades, be they to an existing image or a fresh image from a brand new version.

I had no trouble getting Ubuntu 7.x going (gutsy gibbon for those following Ubuntu's naming scheme). However, when I tried 8.0.x (hardy heron) I - and many others as well - had enormous difficulties. The image just would not load. Other people had different issues but the consensus was that perhaps 8.x was not ready for prime time when it was new.

I eventually went back to 7.x and stayed there. I don't know what the current status is of the Ubuntu distros.