[Coco] For the love of an OS.

[Tony]

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...

T