the friday blog

I seem to have started off here, at The Friday Blog, nattering on about minimalistic word processors and how the desktop layer of my computer (Gnome in my case) is more important to me than the underlying operating system. However, I meant The Friday Blog to be a discussion area for using technology to help with the creative process; in my case, writing. Often I find myself doing my day job, designing websites and updating my various blogs, when I discover a few minutes to spare to update a story that I’m working on. Now, although I have a dedicated “writing machine” it is often easier to stay on my main machine and write on that.

Virtual Desktops

To enable me to do this, I use virtual desktops.  I have three set up on my machine.

In Linux language, these are called Workspaces.

I have one for my day to day work and another for the work I do updating my Life in France blog review site, A Taste of Garlic.

The third runs just one application, PyRoom (of which I spoke about a few weeks ago), the word processor that I use these days.

It often surprises me that more Linux users don’t take advantage of the Workspaces to streamline their workflow.

Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that I’ve doubled my productivity as a result of splitting my workflow across three workspaces.

I’m not sure if the same functionality is available under Winodws.  There used to be, back in the bad old days of Windows for Workgroups 3.11), a Norton Desktop for Windows which I uses to use all the time (maybe 15 years ago!)

But I don’t spend enough time in a Windows environment these days to need similar functionality there.  I’m happy working on a Linux machine and, with that, the functionality is there by default.

I believe that OSX provides similar functionality using their – know as Spaces in OSX speak.

VirtualBox

I can, and often do, also run virtual machines on my workstation.

I started off by using VirtualBox from Sun (now Oracle.)  This worked fine for me apart from occasional problems accessing external USB drives and and an infrequent problem with the buttons on my USB mouse being reversed when I returned to the host OS (Linux Mint in my case.)

Both these problems could be resolved by rebooting the virtual machine.

VMware Player

Perhaps I should have spent more time trying to resolve these problems once and for all but instead, partly due to downloading a free VMware image, I tried out a copy of VMware’s excellent competitor to VirtualBox… Player.

VMware’s Player has worked perfectly for me with the only slight niggle that, recently, I’ve noticed a dramatic slowdown in my host OS whilst installing a new OS under Player.

As this is something that I do an awful lot of, under normal circumstances I would put in the effort to work out what was going on and implement a fix.

KVM

For some strange reason, however, a few days ago, when I found myself about to install Puppy Linux for an article that I was writing for www.kmeckstein.com (And they call it Puppy Love…), I decided to give KVM a go.

Now, I’d always thought that KVM was complicated to install, set  up and use.  I imagined that I’d have to recompile the kernel and spend an eternity in a terminal.  I thought that it would be too geeky even for me!

Then again, I realised that as KVM is now built into the kernel, perhaps all that nastiness could be avoided and I also suspected that it might just prove to be the most efficient method of virtualisation (for my requirements, on a desktop machine) as a result.

I have to admit that I was absolutely shocked by how easy it was to install and set up KVM!

As KVM is in the Mint Linux repository, all that was required was to fire up Synaptic, select KVM and virt-manager and hit the big red button!

All that was left to do was to add myself to the KVM and virt-manager user groups and log out and then log back in.

Installing a guest OS under KVM is also a doddle (I’ve only installed Linux based Operating systems so far; I’ll let you know if I hit problems with Windows.)

I started off by installing Puppy Linux 5.0 (Lucid Puppy) for the article that I was writing and, it was there, waiting for me just 2 mintues later.

Now, I know that Puppy is a very fast beast when it comes to installation (and this has improved with the latest version but… I do have to say that I was very impressed.)

I’ve been using Puppy for a few days now and there  have been no problems at all.  I’ve still got some things to sort out with regards to KVM.  I’d like to run guest operating systems in seamless mode (so that they use the whole screen as though they were the only installed operating system) and then somehow tab between them and the host OS.

I’ll need to work on that.

For  the moment my thoughts are that it was no more hassle installing an OS under KVM than under VirtualBox or VMware Player.  Perhaps even a little bit easier?

Performance seems to be slightly faster but, it’s early days and, to be honest, all three virtualisation platforms were more than fast enough for me.

I do get the feeling that KVM uses less system resources than the two other products; difficult to be precise – more of a feeling than something that I can quantify.  I’d be interested to hear from anyone who could say yea or nay to that.

But, overall, I’m more than happy with the ease of use of KVM.

It wasn’t the nightmare that I’d expected.

In fact, it was a bit of a shock how easy it was to install and use!

Summary

I don’t suppose that it really matters if you use Workspaces (under a Linux environment) or if you run Virtual Machines.

Having multiple desktops, however you choose to do it, each of them perfectly configured for the job in hand, can’t help but make you more productive.

For me, virtual machines have a slight edge as they allow me to run multiple instances of Thunderbird (my email client of choice.  I have a number of Thunderbird profiles; each accessing a number of mail files – it is nice to be able to run these concurrently rather than having to log out of one profile and log back in to another. )

Using Workspaces, I am only able to run one instance of Thunderbird.  There may be a solution to this; if there is, I’d be interested to know what it is.

I also like the idea of being able to perform granular backups of my guest operating systems (and, of course, their data.)  I’ve got the disk space to maintain a number of backups for each guest machine so, I guess, that’s what I’ll be looking at next.

From a Green perspective, it’s got to be more efficient running just one machine (perhaps having another purely for contingency purposes) rather than having a whole host of them?

And, whilst I do have to admit that I’m not too evangelistic about saving the planet (I try, I really do!) but, if reducing my energy consumption also reduces my expenditure… Well, I’m all for saving my pocket and, if it helps the planet as well…..

Adendum

OK – SO, I installed Windows XP under KVM whilst I was writing this article (and this article didn’t take that long to write!) with really no problems at all. The install stopped at the point of the first Windows reboot and I had to click on the Run menu option to kick it into play again but, really that’s it! I should say that the installation took a while longer than the Puppy Linux and Debian Linux installs that I’d already done but, that’s just Windows for you!

All the best

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