[Coco] For the love of an OS.

[Frank Pittel]

I may need to clarify my position on virtual machines. In the server space
it's getting to be close to impossible to justify not using virtual
machines. As very powerful servers are getting very cheap. How does one
justify having racks of idle servers when a single physical box can handle
the load of 5,6,7,,,,10+ physical machine? I am a firm believer in having
higher counts of single purpose machines and VMs give me the ability to do
that. Even at home I've consolidated 7 aging physical servers into one
with each running in a zone under solaris. (I'm a solaris sys admin by
profesion)

However, the desktop is another matter altogether. While I get by with
virtualbox (I have a paid for license for vmware workstation and switched to
the free virtualbox) when I need to run an application there are severe
limitations to it for day to day use. Among them is resource utilization.
For example the memory you allocate to a vm via virtualbox is reserved in
it's entirety when you start the vm. I know ram is relativly cheap but there
are limits to how much I can have!! There's also the resource overhead of
running the vm and as Aaron has pointed out there are performance issues
that don't exist. While it's tolerable for the situations when only windows
apps are available. A few that come to mind is the software for programming
my tv remote, delorame mapping software and one or two other apps I run.
It's not nearly as good a solution as native linux apps. The issues with
virtualbox means I fire it up when I want to run a windows app and shut it
down when done.

As far as dual booting goes windows is a slovan pig and assumes that all the
partitions are available for it's use and has no problem overwriting the mbr
so that only window will boot. I used to play that game back in the day of
dos and windows 3.1 but will NEVER dual boot between the two again. Better
to not run windows software at all then dual boot.


The Other Frank


On Tue, May 03, 2011 at 10:00:49AM -0400, Frank Swygert wrote:
> As long as Microsoft continues to create software that intentionally won't play well with others (proprietary -- like Silverlight) there will always be a problem. It's not like they have a lot of competition! I wouldn't mind a version for Linux even if I have to pay for it. There is Moonlight, but it's not fully compatible, or won't work with Netflix.
> 
> The biggest hurdle for most programmers seems to be that there are so many Linux versions that they can't support them and lock others totally out of their code. It doesn't take much to tweak the code that will run on say Fedora to run on an Ubuntu distribution, but it may take some tweaking/patching to get it to run right.
> 
> Companies have other choices, so why do they let Microsoft sell them on something like Silverlight that won't run on just about anything? I can instantly watch Netflix only through a Virtual machine (I use Sun Virtual Box) on Linux. Or I could dual-boot, but that defeats the purpose of running Linux to begin with.
> 
> I have a quad core processor on my HT machine (replaced my DVD player with a computer, don't use it as a DVR though). Virtual Box let's you set how many of the cores to use. Since I'm not doing anything else when watching Netflix videos, I could probably get by with letting the VM use three cores, but I set it to use two. Beats having to reboot the machine if I happen to have it running and decide to watch something on Netflix. Haven't got the VM to use a wide screen format yet though. Other than that there are no headaches, and I like the VM bettet than the dual-boot option.
> 
> -----------------
> Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 20:37:33 -0700
> From: Steve Bjork<6809er at srbsoftware.com>
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Frank Swygert
> Publisher, "American Motors Cars"
> Magazine (AMC)
> For all AMC enthusiasts
> http://www.amc-mag.com
> (free download available!)
> 
> 
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