bobpeers -> blog

I’ve still been dipping my toes in the world of Virtualization over the last couple of weeks first of all using innoteks Virtualbox and more recently giving VMWare Server a try.

From what I’ve read I expected VMWare to be far more polished (which it was) but I didn’t really find it any more usable than Virtualbox, in fact if anything I found Virtualbox a little faster.

The great thing has been just trying many different operating systems without any risk. I’ve always been a Gnome user but a few of the Linux distros I tried had pretty nice KDE desktops that I might consider using in future. I’ve always like the clean simplicity of Gnome and found KDE too messy, just looking into the KDE menus gives me a headache and the sheer amount of options that can be changed just leaves me confused. Sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

Having said that I see the KDE is a very powerful desktop and includes many apps not found in Gnome, plus in the 3.5 and 4.0 releases it seems much more user friendly.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at the speed of virtual machines even if they are only given 256MB of RAM. Mepis runs great, at least a fast as my native Fedora 8 install with twice the RAM.

Apart from needing more RAM in my laptop it’s made me realise that I also need a bigger hard disk, I replaced mine last year with an 80GB model but since it dual boots Windows XP Professional and Fedora 8 there’s not a massive amount of space left.

By the time you have a few virtual machines installed and have the ISO files lying around as well the space disappears rapidly. On a related not I must have downloaded 20GB of ISO files in the last few weeks trying out the different systems, it’s a good job my internet connection is fast and not capped (which seems a rarety these days).

I thing my next laptop will need at least 4GB of RAM and a 250GB disk to really do justice to Virtualization.