Virtualisation

I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with vir­tu­al­isa­tion for the last few days. Being on Win­dows Vista 64-bit, I can’t use VMWare (because of driver sign­ing) so I had to use to Vir­tu­al­Box which, I’ve found, is actu­ally bet­ter and lighter than VMWare. Des­pite a few (very minor) bugs, I love VirtualBox’s seam­less mode — it essen­tially allows you to work with two oper­at­ing sys­tems as if they were one.

It’s also given me a chance to play about with Ubuntu 8.10. Since the release of Ubuntu 8.04, I’ve been set on 8.10 being the defin­it­ive ver­sion and whilst it does feel a bit stronger and more cap­able than 8.04, I’m not so sure that it is what I had hoped. The UI is still ugly and Open­Of­fice is still lacklustre com­pared to the likes of Microsoft Office. In a nut­shell, it needs to take a big step towards Win­dows in order for it to be a viable option for reg­u­lar con­sumers. It is, how­ever, defin­it­ively ready as a home server and I’ll defin­it­ively be incor­por­at­ing it into a pro­ject. Details to follow…

Comments

5 responses have been made so far. Add your comments.

  1. Pablothehat said at November 5th 2008 at 12:52 pm:

    I have been using Netvibes for a few years now and I find it just a great way to use the pc.
    I am still on XP and didn’t real­ise that VMWare wasn’t Visa com­pat­ible so thanks for the heads up on that.
    I have a copy of Vir­tual Box but I haven’t exper­i­mented with it yet. You men­tioned a couple of bug but you didn’t give any details.
    I have use Linux in the past on VM but since my last pc died I haven’t had the time to resur­rect them yet.
    Some­time I guess.

  2. Sid Roberts said at November 5th 2008 at 4:44 pm:

    It is Vista com­pat­ible — only the 32-bit ver­sion. I have the 64-bit ver­sion (for my 4GB of memory) — most Vista installs are 32-bit.

    The bugs are really minor and it can be used without ever noti­cing them — little things like when a vir­tual win­dow is moved quickly, the vir­tual OS’s desktop back­ground can be seen where the vir­tual win­dow was.

  3. Chris said at November 6th 2008 at 10:06 am:

    I really like this.

  4. Daniel said at April 30th 2009 at 6:18 pm:

    I won­der about the “UI is still ugly” state­ment. With 3 clicks, Ubuntu 8.10 looked like this on my Desktop: http://dldw.de/tmp/index.php?file=i_Bildschirmfoto.jpg

    Not ugly at all. You should really visit http://www.gnome-look.org, where you can find everything to style your linux as you like it: From basic Unix style, over Mac OS X style to Win­dows Vista style. And this all only 2 clicks away ;-)

  5. Sid Roberts said at April 30th 2009 at 6:45 pm:

    But with XP/Vista/7 and OS X, you don’t need to — their default themes are OK. Ubuntu’s default theme looks really old. It has got bet­ter over the last sev­eral releases but it’s still behind every other OS in terms of style.

    I’m toy­ing with 9.04 at the moment and I par­tic­u­larly like “New Wave” which comes with 9.04 and, in my opin­ion, is much nicer than “Human”.

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