Local Linux, Cloud, and Virtual Machines

This past week I accomplished a number of things.

I attended the local Linux user group. They are going through a transition, expanding their focus from Linux to open source. The change makes sense; when they were formed, Linux was a difficult beast and one needed a lot of technical knowledge. In today's world, the modern distros install themselves. (I recently installed Kubuntu 11.10 and the process was simple.)

The change in focus requires a new focus, and the challenge to the group is to identify it. No one is stepping forward to claim ownership, and the transition has stalled. I have considered stepping up, but I have no clear vision for the group, no "itch" that I want to "scratch". As such, I consider myself an inappropriate candidate.

The cloud computing meeting had an informative presentation on database.com, a "spin-off" of the salesforce.com folks. I chatted with a number of folks; these meetings attract people with varying degrees of experience.

The cloud computing group was in the Washington area, and it highlights the challenge of my living and working arrangements. Living in Baltimore and working in Washington leads to a long commute, even on the train. It also locks me out of a number of activities -- I arrive in Baltimore too late to participate, and I must leave too early to participate in Washington events.

As to virtual machines, I made modest progress with my local tests. I successfully connected to a virtual machine with remote access software. I had to completely disable the firewall on the host system, and the color palette leaves a bit to be desired. But it is success, and I am looking forward to tuning the arrangement, adjusting the firewall to allow access and handling the color palette. I also found instructions for creating a headless virtual machine, which makes a lot of sense for remote operation. I'll have to read up on the process; it is something more than simple.

Revisiting virtualization

I dusted off some virtual machines today. They are experiments, to see how virtualization performs in different environments.

I use VMware and Oracle's Virtualbox. Both had updates; new versions of the virtual machine software.

The updates for Virtualbox ran a bit smoother than VMware. Both programs alerted me to the new version, and let me download them. Both updates were replacements and not patches. That is, both un-installed the old version and then installed the new version. And both new versions had new "inside helper" packages, utilities that install drivers inside the guest operating system to help the "outside" virtualization program.

It was the installation of helper utilities that Oracle beat VMware. With VMware, you have to run a script, answer several prompts, and let the script compile several modules for your system. (The questions have default answers, but they are sensible only to a sysadmin.) Virtualbox, on the other hand, installed the helper utilities without prompts or compiling.

For both VMware and Virtualbox, the improvements were evolutionary, not revolutionary: small improvements to the GUI, noticeable changes in support for devices.

And for VMware and Virtualbox, performance was acceptable. Virtual machines run a little slower than a "real" machine, but the difference is small.

I don't use Microsoft's Virtual PC, as it refuses to run on my hardware. My PC is a two-year-old SystemMax PC with a nice Intel processor and 4 GB RAM, but apparently it lacks something that Virtual PC needs. So I limit my tests to VMware and Virtualbox.

Sharing evil plans

I attended the GBTC meeting for "Evil Plans" tonight. This was a meeting of meetings; a parliament of local groups to discuss meetings and schedules. Baltimore has enough special-interest technical groups that our schedules collide. This meeting was to introduce the groups and let them work out their scheduling conflicts. (Working out non-conflicting schedules is to every group's benefit, since other events pull people away.)

About fifty people attended, all creative in their own way. Some were hard-core programmers, others web developers, and others teachers. It was a creative mix of creative people!