Who Needs Information - May 2010

With a few days spare and bored with killing Greeks and Macedonians in RTW Gold I have been experimenting more with programs that organize information. Thailand is more or less shut, my Philippine validations lapsed, so nowhere to fly.

Zim is one program that I've spent some time getting used to. It lacks some features (automatic index of child pages for each parent) that I'd like but overall it is a useful personal wiki. I'm using the Macports version: reasonably stable. The HTML export works well. I'm mainly using Zim to support my aviation studies (tooling up for my trip to USA).

I have installed a minimal Debian 5 in VMWare. I did the normal install from a debian-504-i386-netinst.iso but then didn't add any groups of programs so that I started with the base system. This means that it only has the programs that I want. So far:

• xorg
• xdm
• fluxbox
• nedit
• diction
• links
• links2 (first time using this, and I like it)
• zim
• rpncalc
• dc
• ruby
• kernel headers
• make
• gcc 4.1
• psmisc
• plus of course what these depend on.

I installed VMWare Tools so that I could work with a reasonable resolution. Tools compiled and ran without any errors so I have a screen that almost fills my Macbook Pro screen.

I'll need to root around to find some of my old scripts to get it all as I want. I might even try getting xdmshutdown working again. I have another working Linux on my old desktop drive so I might get that up and running again as well.

I have a running BeOS 5, and a Haiku to play with in VMWare so I'll not be bored. But I plan to leave that fun until after I return from the USA.

virtual world

I've been playing with virtual machines in OS X and my experiences have not been at all good.

Parallels 3 works well for running my boot camp XP partition but I have learned to upgrade with care and not to use the upgrade from within Parallels itself: download the upgrade from the Parallels site, upgrade, reinstall tools, works best. Parallels however was one of the suspects for trashing my boot camp partition after an disk change: the evil Spotlight was the other suspect. I had backups so I was able to backtrack and repeat the installation again but this time avoiding running Parallels until after Spotlight had stopped doing what is does best - insisting on indexing and using up way too much CPU when I don't want it to run at all.

Parallels 4 was a release to far from all that I have read so I'm waiting a while before upgrading.

I have used VMWare to run BeOS Max - works reasonably well with a few issues: CivCTP upgrade will not run (blank screen), dodgy file manager in Max. Network works well. I have two instances running, one on the Macbook Pro and one on the Mac Pro.

VMWare is running instances of Debian 5 and Ubuntu 9 (both minimal installs) with tools installed. The tools allow me to resize the screen but the X fonts don't scale well for browsers - I get a big print edition. The Network works well as does USB.

Virtualbox 3 runs instances of Debian 5 and Ubuntu 9 (again minimal installs) with tools installed. The screens resize well without breaking the font sizes. USB does not work reliably so USB drives may or may not be recognized and if they are they may ar may not be write protected even if lacking write protect: broken. The network is not reliable: I switch between WiFi networks or USB 3G broadband and cannot be sure of the virtual machine continuing to have network access using NAT. Use the Intel network emulation - the default is worse and will fail mid net install of Ubuntu or Debian

My conclusion is that these products are not really ready for mainstream easy use. Running the nasty windows os may provide better experiences but I suspect that the main issue is OS X support for VMWare and Virtual Box.

I may try virtual linux in Parallels next - just for fun.