Techie

The Good: Bringing it up to level of workstation/fusion virtual machine compatibility? Vix if you are into the innards of virtualization. The Bad: Wow I mean where do you start? Let me walk you through my install process. I upgraded from the original vmware server to beta on an Ubuntu Gutsy box. The install process was smooth as butter and worked like a champ. I expect the smoothness because VMware is the benchmark for easy installs on Linux (only behind Google for using the Loki Installer) and has always shown that. What I never expected was the actual usage of the software. Gone is your GUI console. Hold on to that for a minute. It is gone, totally non-existstent. The GUI was replaced by a Web interface using AJAX. It all feels very Web 2.0 which is great for when I log into Digg or Facebook (Ooohh Shinny!) but this is enterprise software. What makes the web interface unbearable is the speed. Has anyone used Yahoo! Mail beta AJAX interface? It has brought this quad-processor 4GiB RAM machine to its knees. That is how the VMware Web console feels. VMware! WAKE UP! Web interfaces are great and when you make it optional like you always have with WebUI packages. Optional, it only adds to the flexibility your company has given admins and architects everywhere. I understand the reasoning, web runs everywhere and gives you a lot of options for using thin clients and PDA’s. ...

Skype (or ebay) have been killing me for years now. I am a huge Skype user and always loved the video chat option. I have gone back and installed webcams for most of my family in order to keep track of everyone on my crazy travel days. The one issue I had was the conflict of skype and my desire to convert my family to Linux. Skype on Linux was always a second-class citizen. I resorted to using aMSN which worked, albeit on a very poor performance level. Yesterday though I awoke to an excitment I hadn’t seen in months. My RSS feed showed one topic new in the Skype folder. I preemptively booted my Ubuntu laptop and sure enough I was right, video support. After a quick download and install I had video chat on my Linux box. This of course initiated a victory dance. The great thing was the victory dance was captured from 2 different angles thus solidifying my lack of dancing skills for all to see :) ...

I love Leopard! Single best upgrade I have done this year for operating systems. Vista was obviously a waste of time and Gutsy was incremental over Feisty. One thing that I have been throwing my head against the wall with is Mail.app using IMAP Gmail. I screwed up my settings and have gone through deleting the Mail in my Library and Preferences, yet no matter how many times I deleted the settings were still there. I then ran Mail.app from console and sure enough, time machine was automatically restoring the settings. While in any other case this would be great and a huge boost to a home user. A power user it just bugged me. The process is to remove Mail.app backups from your timemachine disk. Just a heads up

This allows you to setup a Xgrid controller without mac server edition. What is nifty is that the clients can run on other platforms such as Linux and Windows. So with the simplicity of mac you can run a cluster at the house. Here is the link for windows/linux clients: http://unu.novajo.ca/simple/archives/000026.html ...

I am done dealing with OpenSuSE 10.3. Before anyone starts I realize that it is a beta release candidate “blah blah blah.” I expect simple things to work without a hassle such as touchpads and wifi. Now laptops have always been the bane of Linux, but as of recently Ubuntu ran better than XP on this Sony TXN17p I have. In fact out of the box the hotkeys for sound Linus called Solaris a “buggy piece and backlight worked with no configuration. On OpenSuSE it shipped with none of that. While I expected this on 10.1 and MAYBE 10.2, to do this in 2007 is insane. Most people in this world now own laptops, not desktops. ACPI and Eject buttons should work out of the box. Not to mention this is a sony laptop and not jims computer shop or something. Sonypi and sony-laptop has been a staple of the Linux module kernels for at least 3 revs. SuSE I love(d) you! You were my first true Linux distro. I remember the 4.8 days of 12 CD’s and a manual that if thrown could break walls. Now you are a Novell puppet and not living up to the standards of your peers. Goodbye my love, I am off to the Cape of Good Hope!