I count myself pretty lucky for a work thing. I can run Linux on a daily basis for work and be productive. A friend of mine is a Project Manager for SBC on some rather large integration projects down in San Jose. He is a devout Linux user but has found that his work days are surrounded with the twin brothers: Visio and Project. I did this for awhile too and the two things even run in VMware get one frustrated because of the time it takes to get a thing done. Booting a computer within a computer is an interesting paradigm shift all on its own. But then running applications within a computer booted within a computer make it almost sublime. My friend and work colleague AFT tells me stories about running Virtual PC on a Mac and it seems that’s the same way. I happen to think that VMware is decent and it does the things one needs. But I got to say… VMware Workstation is damned hard to install on Debian Unstable with a recent kernel. Why? What is the kernel memory space thing and why does it matter? There are patches that don’t work either. I left that and went to the beta VMware Server instead. VMware server installs easily and runs all the time over reboots, etc. No big issues. Then you just download the monitor application and share the guest and guys you want to allow can share your guests from other systems. Running a XP Professional guest is nice enough for me these days. As I said, I can do a large percent from Linux.
My friend Ron at SBC bemoans the drawings and MS Project GANTTs he gets which include hundreds of tasks, too many milestones, lots of resources, and drawings within drawings. I’ve been there before too though.
But the real thing I wanted to get to is running the new Ubuntu. Anybody done it? Views on it? I am probably gonna give it a shot since I tend to like debian based stuff over rpm distributions. RPM distributions seem like some kind of stretch and no matter what tool is used to manage the RPMs, things for me just never go right. I can mess up a Fedora Core 5 install in mere minutes. I’ve been thinking though of downloading Ubuntu dapper drake (love that name, man!) and shoot it into VMware server as a guest.
When it comes down to it, I always return to Debian. I’ve loved it, wondered about it, donated to it, and rolled it out in data centers. Side by side with some no-name RPM distribution, it kicks some serious butt at remote administration. Give me rsync, vim, screen! Talk about toolkits.
