Linux for the timid

Thanks to Chicken or Beef for reminding me that there are more ways than one to play with Linux these days. For the most part installing Linux - if you can figure out which one to install - is relatively painless. In fact its usually no different from installing Windows on a PC or laptop that you don't have all the manufacturer specific drivers for - which I did today. Thank goodness for the Internet and a working machine connected to it.

But it is still possible to botch an installation - especially when you're going to have the Linux installer repartition your hard drive to make room for a dual-boot system. At this point non-techie installers who might be dabbling with Linux will tend to bite their nails and worry. Last year I thought I'd play it super safe and install the latest Ubuntu on my external USB drive and boot from that, but guess what, it ended up zapping my Windoze partition. Sigh. At that point I found out my backups really do work (thank goodness for Retrospect, but in this case I'd already tested it before hand.

Thus I was happy to find out that VMWare is now dishing out a free virtual machine "player" that lets you load virtual machine images created by third parties. I was interested in virtualization technologies so I gave it a whirl and loaded up their browser appliance virtual machine image. Well stone the crows if it wasn't an Ubuntu Linux preloaded with Mozilla Firefox and a few other goodies. I could even browse my Windows network, and fire up an RDP client to log into remote Windows machines. Sweet. Believe me, this is a serious alternative to dual boot and for development very convenient. I didn't run benchmarks but even on my lowly 1.6Mhz laptop it seemed to run lickety split.

Even better after digging up that link for my comment on Chicken or Beef I discovered that Ubuntu now has a full development Ubuntu 5.10 virtual machine available for VMWare Player. Other Linux people are following suit - Novell, Red Hat to name a few. Its a great and really low impact way to evaluate a product, even one that's not a native Windows app. And because VMWare Player persists a file system between "boots" you can actually get serious work done with them.