[conspire] (forw) Re: InstallFest on Apr. 13th

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> I had been planning to come Saturday, mostly because I haven't been in
> too long.  

Wel'd love to see you -- and the spring garden's all planted for you to 
make polite noises of encouragement about.  ;->

> Now I want to hear more info VM and other alternatives to dual boot. 
> I have managed with dual boot, mostly because I need a specific
> application, like tax program, that is not available in Linux
> compatible mode. Also a lot of applications are available for multiple
> OS's, for example, gimp, gnucash, xfoil.

Yeah, that actually would be good material for a short lecture if I can
put one together in the next couple of days -- maybe with a handout
sheet or three.

My _existing_ crufty write-up starts fifteen paragraphs into
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/?page=kicking#partition -- which is one 
reason why I need to throw it out and rewrite it afresh.  And said
existing text is vague and imcomplete, too.

What it really comes down to is:  Hey, what problem are you really
trying to solve?  Just need to preserve the ability to run a couple of
Windows apps while adopting Linux?  Then, maybe dual-boot is the suckest
possible way.  Alternatives include:

1.  Various ways to run Win32 apps right on Linux.  WINE, CrossOver,
GameTree Linux (formerly Cedega, Formerly WineX).

2.  Various VM (virtual machine) frameworks:  VirtualBox, VMware
Workstation, VMware ESX, VMware Fusion, VMware Player, Hyper-V,
Parallels Workstation, Virtuozzo, others.  

(VirtualBox is dead simple, and all of it is, at least, free of charge
for personal use.  All of its code except some optional extensions 
is open source under GPLv2 and CDDL.)

3.  Remote app schemes:  VNC, RDP (rdesktop client), X11 across the
network, FreeNX, NoMachine NX Server / NX Client, others.

I.e., unless you need everything to work on a single mobile machine
(notebook/laptop), then maybe you should leave your MS-Windows machine
alone except to install UltraVNC (untested by this reporter) on it, 
permitting you to have such ready access to run Windows apps remotely
(usinga Linux VNC client) that you end up removing the monitor from your
Windows box as superfluous.

It's a pity that Microsoft carefully does not offer Remote Desktop
Services (formerly Terminal Services) separately from Windows Server
2008, because otherwise people would use that very widely to solve the
same problem, i.e., you could use /usr/bin/rdesktop the way you can a
VNC client to run apps off any networked host running a VNC server.

As it is, /usr/bin/rdesktop is extremely useful to Linux users in
corporations running Windows Server.