Linux « Venkat’s TechLog

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Hardwares and Softwares

Friday, June 6th, 2008

I have been using open source and free software for a decade now. I thought its time to dedicate a post to them. I am $Venkat\'s PC$ often asked which is the best software to do this or do that. In this post you will find the list of softwares that I use regularly and can’t do without. This post also includes the hardware which is equally important. I am not evangelizing any product or company. I am just posting what I thought was enormously useful and made a difference to me:

The Hardware

My home PC has been an AMD for the past 5 years. I currently use a AMD Athlon X2 with 6 gigs of RAM. It has a 19inch Viewsonic and three network cards. I also have a Wifi Router and a UPS which gives me around 20 minutes of backup. I use the Dell SK-8115 USB keyboard.
I hate carrying big laptops, so my latest buy is Asus Eee PC 4G which runs Xandros. I use this when traveling.

Softwares

Operating Systems
My home PC has been running opensuse for the past 3 years. It currently runs opensuse 10.3 x86-64 with kernel recompiled. I also have Slackware 12 dual booted. Through Virtualbox I run a whole lot of other operating systems.
My Eee PC 4G runs Xandos. I previously had a phone running Symbian Series 60v3, now I have a Windows Mobile 6 .

The Web Browser
Goes without saying, I currently use Firefox 3.0. Konqueror sometimes.

Instant Messengers
Pidgin and Skype for Linux.

Office Tools
Open Office suite – primarily Open Office Writer. Dia for flow charts and diagrams.

Image Manupulation
GIMP

Virtualization
Virtualbox

Email Client
Thunderbird and Google Apps for my domain TechProtocol.com.

Text Editor
Vi, JEdit and gedit

IDEs
Netbeans and Eclipse

Compliers
GCC and Java

Search
Google and Grep

FTP
Filezilla

Download
Azureus and DownThemAll! (extension for Firefox)

Remote Access
TightVNC and SSH

Viewers
KPDF

Document Creation
LaTeX

Blog
Wordpress

Multimedia

Xine and MPlayer. Amarok for Music.

CD/DVD Burning
K3B

System Management
Yast

Posted in Hardware, Linux, Software, open source, sun microsystems | 1 Comment »

Virtualization using VirtualBox – Simultaneously running 5 operating systems

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

I have been experimenting with VirtualBox for the past 3 months. My experience so far has been good. VirtualBox is simple to configure and use. VirtualBox OSE is definitely something you don’t want to try out. Its very buggy. However, the licensed version shipped with the installer is good. The best part of VirtualBox is that the images are very portable. My friend installed Solaris on his mac using VirtualBox and I had to copy the image to get it running on my x86-64. Sweet.

VirtualBox performs well. I have a AMD Athlon X2 x86-64 with 6 gigs of RAM. I was able to run 5 operating systems simultaneously on my openSuse 10.3 guest with VirtualBox installed. Check out the screenshots at the end of this post. Absolutely no performance lag. Everything worked smoothly. I could burn a DVD and play some music on my guest with the 5 operating systems running. Many would attribute this to the hardware configuration. However, I give equal credit to the hardware and the software.

Apart from the above, I have also tried running legacy operating systems on VirtualBox, like Slackware 96. For Slackware 96, Installation started but then it conked. Had some luck with Red Hat 5.2, but the installation hung at the last stages. Planning to try out BeOS and OS2Warp in the near future. The other interesting thing that I tried was the nested virtual machine installation. Installed Windows XP on openSuse 10.3 x86-64 host. Then installed Virtual Box on Windows XP and then tried Ubuntu with Windows XP as guest. The installation did not start. Not sure why. Will give this a try again. If anyone got any of this working, let me know.

The following screenshots show VirtualBox on openSuse 10.3 x86-64 host with 5 guest operating systems running simultaneously – Ulteo, Mandriva, Open Solaris, Slackware and Windows XP.