Virutal machines...
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Marc Clifton wrote:
Whoever thought that a window's scrollbar should be hidden, requiring precise hovering over just those few pixels on the edge of the window so that the scrollbar pops up, and then it's this ridiculous slider thing, well, that person should be banned from UI design.
+1 ... that's one of the reasons I prefer other desktops over Ubuntu's Unity ... and thus use Kubuntu instead (i.e. KDE desktop pre-packaged into Ubuntu without any Unity / Gnome stuff). As for the sluggish mouse ... don't know ... wasn't that way for me: Kubuntu 64 host OS, VirtualBox with Wen 64 as client OS. Mouse worked seamlessly - just unfortunate that VB's drivers hasn't been updated for Wen (yet), thus 3d programs were less than acceptable while they work reasonably in a client W7 (not great but not causing hair pulling).
irneb wrote:
and thus use Kubuntu instead
Thanks! I'll take a look at that. Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
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irneb wrote:
and thus use Kubuntu instead
Thanks! I'll take a look at that. Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
Just to advise: I like KDE not because of its looks but more because it's so damned customizable. Actually it looks like what W8 should've been as an upgrade of W7's UI. If that one's not for you, there are various other desktops available for Ubuntu. From Gnome 2 or 3, through Lxde (like a very light weight XP) or Xfce (light-weight OSX lookalike if you customize it a bit) through to several others: http://www.howtogeek.com/163154/linux-users-have-a-choice-8-linux-desktop-environments/[^] You also don't need to uninstall Ubuntu to try out another desktop. You can install a new desktop from the Software Centre and then should have an option in the login screen. I just don't like wasting several megs of my SSD on something I'll never use.
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Just to advise: I like KDE not because of its looks but more because it's so damned customizable. Actually it looks like what W8 should've been as an upgrade of W7's UI. If that one's not for you, there are various other desktops available for Ubuntu. From Gnome 2 or 3, through Lxde (like a very light weight XP) or Xfce (light-weight OSX lookalike if you customize it a bit) through to several others: http://www.howtogeek.com/163154/linux-users-have-a-choice-8-linux-desktop-environments/[^] You also don't need to uninstall Ubuntu to try out another desktop. You can install a new desktop from the Software Centre and then should have an option in the login screen. I just don't like wasting several megs of my SSD on something I'll never use.
irneb wrote:
You can install a new desktop from the Software Centre and then should have an option in the login screen.
Ah, wonderful. I was wondering about that, did a little research already and didn't really want to create a new VM. I've used Lxde with the Beaglebone, it's definitely really nice to have different desktop choices, it's something I wish Windows provided. Marc
Imperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Higher Order Programming
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Not that I have anything else to do this morning, I installed When on Virtual Box, was unhappy with it and tried again with VM Workstation. Much better performance, mouse less sluggish. But it caused me to think about the wonders and possibilities of using VMs to protect onself from catastrophe. I'm a consultant, and I image my main working laptop drive weekly. I cannot afford the time to re-install all of my software. But playing with VMs this weekend - suggests just using a VM to begin with, keep all work in container files and let the native OS just be a very limited native OS. How many of you follow this approach? The performance seems acceptable, especially on my Xp VM. I use Win 7 Pro 64bit day to day. Thought I might have to re-install everything into the new VM, but no, vmware provides a nifty utility to just pull it in to the new container.
Charlie Gilley Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
To keep your image running, virtualize just the HDD[^].
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Not that I have anything else to do this morning, I installed When on Virtual Box, was unhappy with it and tried again with VM Workstation. Much better performance, mouse less sluggish. But it caused me to think about the wonders and possibilities of using VMs to protect onself from catastrophe. I'm a consultant, and I image my main working laptop drive weekly. I cannot afford the time to re-install all of my software. But playing with VMs this weekend - suggests just using a VM to begin with, keep all work in container files and let the native OS just be a very limited native OS. How many of you follow this approach? The performance seems acceptable, especially on my Xp VM. I use Win 7 Pro 64bit day to day. Thought I might have to re-install everything into the new VM, but no, vmware provides a nifty utility to just pull it in to the new container.
Charlie Gilley Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Give KVM a try. At least that's what the "big boys" use in their data centers. In *buntu, apt-get install virt-manager and add your old machines to it. You will find that, with the virtio drivers and raw disk images, no cache and native threads, and a bit more ram, windows will run faster in the VM than on bare metal. This is because the kvm hypervisor does a good job on caching hot disk chunks in spare ram automagically. However you loose on the desktop integration side. As for backwards compatibility, there are other goodies you can find in the linux world. My uncle for example has to run some visualFox 6 and FoxPRO 2 ( good ol' msdos) apps and the hardware he was using is dying out. Windows 7 and up, completely ripped out the COM/OLE 16 bit compatibility layer thus making it impossible to just purchase hardware with a win sticker and run your tools. We ended up using DosBox and wine on a linux box with the old Microsoft OLE/COMs extracted from a windows 98 CD. It runs perfectly. As to why they still use it, well, one can not simply upgrade a county's retirement fund software to the latest and greatest :)) http://virt-manager.org/[^]