I don't know whether any of you use Virtual Machines much? I have been mucking around with them for a bit and they can be great fun as you can set up a test operating system and play around with it. Most enable you to surf the net etc. I have been playing with VirtualBox and had a lot of fun. (VMware is well known too of course and very fully featured). VirtualBox works on Linux, Windows AND Mac!
Anyway I also discovered that the latest version of Ubuntu was released yesterday with the ability (only available on the "Alternate Install" disk) to install itself on to the hard drive as a fully encrypted disk!. So I am going to try it out in the VirtualBox and let you know how I get on! As an aside I did run the latest Live install disk on the Church's laptop a Dell Inspirion 1300 and discovered everything was up and running - wifi, 3d graphics driver etc. From insert the CD to fully working system with no intervention on my part at all! WOW. When the right software/hardware mix is there Linux will surprise you with it's ease of use!
Kevin
PS Encrypted Gutsey update - it is installing nicely but slowly as you would expect from a virtual machine on an encrypted filesystem! But good news it encrypts the swap disk too! That is important and impressive!
Comments
Re: Virtual Machine
I've been testing Gusty since RC1 came out, and have been quite impressed. During the span of time I've been following Ubuntu releases (almost two years), this has been by far the most innovative. The encrypted hd option on the alternate install cd sounds quite interesting. I wonder why that is not an option on the main cd. Since you are already testing that installer out, does it have options for setting up LVM? I've been thinking about using LVM + the XFS file system on my new laptop I am about to get. I have been using XFS for six months now, and love it.
As far as VMs go, I use VMware very extensively. I used VirtualBox for quite a while, but it is so much easier to set up networking in VMware. Perhaps some day I'll try out KVM.
P.S.
If anyone is having problems downloading 7.10 due to clogged mirrors, check out torrent.ubuntu.com:6969
LVM
Dear Douglass,
Gutsy implements the encrypted filesystem on top of the LVM, so I guess you could use any filesystem you want. Never tried XFS. I briefly flirted with Reiser 3 but went back to ext3 in the end.
As a speed tip I always at noatime to the options in /etc/fstab as this stops ext3 from making a save for every read (to update the "last accessed time" record). That speeds things up by 10% or so. But to be honest I have never been disappointed with the speed of the filesystems!
It is quite neat to see the encrypted filesystem in action as once you boot you have to enter the passphrase and that is as far as you will get! After that it is business as usual.
I chose the "guided setup with LVM and encryption" for ease from the installer. All seemed to go well except I got dumped at the text prompt when the machine rebooted! I tried startx but nothing happened. That was odd. I did a quick (well slow) sudo apt-get install kubuntu and about 700 packages were selected. I had some trouble remounting the CD ("sudo mount /dev/scd0 /cdrom" or something - Linux uses the SCSI subsytem for all disk drives now from IDE to Flash) but eventually it pulled the packages from the internet and all is tickerty boo now!
It does run like a slug under VirtualBox - but it does run! I it definitely the way to go if you want to run Linux on a laptop. As I doubt the encryption will slow much down on a real box (biggest bottleneck is always the hard disk writing).
Perhaps someone else will want to play with this!
cheers,
Kevin
Crypto LVM (ubuntu on Dell Inspiron)
I've been using a fully encrypted root/swap on an encrypted lvm for ubuntu installed on my inspiron (1.8 celeron). No noticeable hit in speed. Runs much faster than Vista (which came pre installed).
doesn't suprise me...
Nice to hear you have it working in the wild! No excuses now. Did you find it straight forward to set up?
Doesn't surprise me it is faster than Vista. I did a head to head start from a cold boot on my Ubuntu Dell Latitude 750Mhz, 192 Mb machine against Steve Sullivan's new Toshiba Vista beast. I won it easily and was typing away at least a couple of minutes before his was responsive. Sigh. Progress eh?!
Cheers,
Kevin
PS Guess who forgot his password for his virtual machine and had to wipe it!
Virtual web development
I started using virtual machines back when I converted to Mac. But since I develop web sites (for mainly Windows users) on a Mac, I found that my code (actually, the CSS) was buggy, and lacked cross-browser compatibility.
That's when I realized I couldn't be a die-hard single platform user, when my audience uses varied OS'es... and browsers.
So now I build (design and code) an Mac OS X and test on Win XP and DSL (linux). As long as a can have virtual copies of my least favorite OSes, then I can live and work in a relatively smooth Mac environment, and avoid the worlds of Windows and... (sorry guys) linux. :-]