[Coco] For the love of an OS.

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 12:09 AM, Tony <tonym at compusource.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 20:37 -0700, Steve Bjork wrote:
>> In front of me, I have Mac, PC (window 7 pro 64-bit) and iOS iPad2.  In
>> back office the are More Macs, PC windows and Linux systems too.  They
>> all get along together!  Each computer or device it running OS that's
>> the best for it.
>>
>> I got an number of micro-controllers that use Windows.  For music and
>> graphics I use both windows and the Mac.  If I need to run a server or
>> NAS than I would most likely drop a Linux kernel on it.
>>
>> But this is the way I've looked at computers for the past 30 years.
>> Even back in the early CoCo days, I used other computers to help create
>> my CoCo programs.  Whatever computer that was best (for me) at the task,
>> that's the one I would pick.
>>
>> Trying to use a poor virtual system is a kluge.  (and not worth the
>> headaches)  Don't get me wrong, there are good virtual systems out
>> there.  (Most are a bit pricey.)  Sometimes it's better to just use the
>> real thing.
>>
>> You may say the real thing is too costly.  Well that's the real test!
>> Does the need justify the cost?
>>
>> I should disclose that I'm in the Windows camp and not so much a Mac
>> user. But most of my coding time is spent work on a Mac.  But use the OS
>> that gets the job done.   I do have other pet projects (on other OS)
>> that I work to get the taste of Steve Job's nEXT OS out of my mouth.
>> (Objective C, yuk!)  Even a little Perl coding can clean the palette.
>>
>> Bottom line, don't kludge.  Just build the real thing.   Or duel boot
>> the computer.  I feel better about the number of macs I own since they
>> all run Windows just fine via Bootcamp.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>
> What's a kludge for you, is a gold mine for me.
>
> I have a quad-core AMD x920 BE-based Dell laptop, 8GB RAM, running
> Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS. For my corporate environment, I have a WinXP x86 VM
> under VirtualBox, with the usual suspects: Office, Visio, vSphere client
> for the data center, etc...
>
> For the rest, I use the Linux OS underneath, or additional VMs.
>
> When I'm travelling, I have an Asterisk VM I bring up so my co-workers
> and I can call home, I have a separate XP VM for toying with the Android
> and WebOS phones, and a few others.
>
> I intentionally purchased and built this laptop for Virtualization, and
> am extremely satisfied with the results!
>
> What you call a kludge, I call the be-all end-all of computing!
>
> Isn't it great that we have so many choices?
>
> The other day, I ran across Groklaw again after a long absence.
> Seriously flashing back, I fired up VirtualBox, and had a Novell Netware
> 6.5 server operational, with an NDS tree and everything, in under 60
> minutes.
>
> I love this stuff - right now I'm using the Linux base for this email,
> and surfing, and have (2) VM's open, one of which is a server I'm
> working on for work. Tomorrow, I'll copy it off the laptop, give the
> VMDK to my server team on a USB stick, they'll import it into our SAN
> cluster for our VMWare ESXi 4.1 cluster, and bring it up in 5 minutes.
>
> I'm also in the process of building a home virtualization server. Right
> now I have 4 systems running everything from the home asterisk, to
> MythTV. A pair of nice 6-core Opteron 4184's, with an Asus KCMA-D8 dual
> socket C32 mainboard, 16GB RAM, VMWare ESXi v4.1, and a Synology DS411j
> SAN will run everything, have boatloads to spare, cost under $1300, and
> use far less power than the current 4-pc setup.
>
> Gotta love how far technology's come...
>

I use virtualization in software development all the time, they allow
me to test software on a variety of OSes and differently configured
systems.  Snapshots are very useful in this situations.  I used VMs to
build and test 64bit versions of DriveWire back when I ran a 32 bit
system, and the same for Linux versions (actually several different
distributions too) when I ran Windows,  They also do great with
merging several servers into one, as you are doing at your house,
although I've seen businesses go way too far with this concept and pay
the price.

However, it's not a lot of fun to actually do development *inside* a
VM.  I done a bit of this and the virtual consoles are not as
responsive as a native one, even in "unity" mode the windows behave a
bit oddly, especially with multiple screens.  Moving data between a VM
and the host is not as seamless as moving data between two native
applications, etc.   I'm not saying it's impossible or even unusable,
but coding inside a VM would not be my first choice.