Friday, April 25, 2008
More adventures with Linux - and virtual machines
Last weekend's aborted attempt to set up a dual-boot system made me think again about which flavor of Linux I'd like. After seeing a demo at a trade show of an OS booting off a secure USB drive and then starting a VMware player version of XP, I realized the answer was pretty obvious - Ubuntu. Version 8.04 is just out and this is a long-term release, too.
My previous reservations with Ubuntu have been that it's too simple, if that's possible - I was feeling restricted by the limited number of packages available for install. This week, RTFM time, and I discovered a straightforward way of unlocking further functionality, simply through enabling the installation of proprietary drivers etc ... which should solve the biggest problem I seem to have - 3D acceleration for my ATI graphics card.
This week I also came across a very, very smooth quasi virtual machine: MojoPac. It's XP only at the moment in terms of both platform and host OS, but apart from that, it uses underlying Windows services but provides a secure environment, running on a portable hard drive or USB stick. Interesting - except that I tend to carry my laptop on trips, for use during the journey. As a just in case - since the installation I saw took a mere 70MB, I'm going to set one up anyway as a just-in-case.
My previous reservations with Ubuntu have been that it's too simple, if that's possible - I was feeling restricted by the limited number of packages available for install. This week, RTFM time, and I discovered a straightforward way of unlocking further functionality, simply through enabling the installation of proprietary drivers etc ... which should solve the biggest problem I seem to have - 3D acceleration for my ATI graphics card.
This week I also came across a very, very smooth quasi virtual machine: MojoPac. It's XP only at the moment in terms of both platform and host OS, but apart from that, it uses underlying Windows services but provides a secure environment, running on a portable hard drive or USB stick. Interesting - except that I tend to carry my laptop on trips, for use during the journey. As a just in case - since the installation I saw took a mere 70MB, I'm going to set one up anyway as a just-in-case.
# posted by Nesjo : 11:50
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