Linux woes

[Autumnlicious]

It confuzzles me that you had use for Xen then as VirtualBox would've done the job neatly enough.

[Angrboda]

It wasn't any one thing, Syn. The Xen was in the mix, but there were a bunch of little factors, including my current financial outlook and "Because I want to."

I sat on it for a day, debating, and basically satisficed. $250 is a cheap upgrade, gets me an extra box, and I figured I faced a better chance of not spending the money and regretting it, than spending it and regretting spending the money.

Course, this means I probably won't be upgrading to a 10" tablet, but them's the breaks.

And I'm getting too old for this shit. I don't keep up with tech anymore, and I don't want to spend a lot of energy figuring out new shit these days. I don't think I'll regret going with Xen, but then I'm kind of new to virtualization. I ran my firewall in a VM for a number of years, but that's the extent of it. I need a Win7 platform, preferably a place I can run 16 bit shit, a *nix for the freebies, and a few virtual appliance apps (like the web browser). I've got a lot to learn about it, and not knowing any better, I figured Xen was a good direction to go. I'll defer to your wisdom in the matter if you care to share it, but I don't see any down side to it, and plenty of up. (I'll have to look into it, but I'm wondering if my video card will run native under the different oses under Xen, and whether I'll be able to use ZFS if I decide to run OpenSolaris. Like I said, I have a lot to learn. This is very much a work in progress.)

Now I need to figure if I want to turn the old box into a DVR. I will only have cable tv for a few more months, but I wanted an htpc for better content management than provided by my WD TV Live. I seem to be converging on multiple paths to the same goal, heedless of the excess cost. I've got my WD TV appliance, but I also just spent about $20 upgrading my video for the workstation so I can run HDMI direct to the TV.

[Autumnlicious]

Paravirtualization is what you use when you need to timeshare the same hardware.

Virtualbox, KVM, Qemu, Vmware et al meet your needs quite well.

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Oh and use ZFS if you can. It's a fantastic filesystem.

[Angrboda]

google+ questions:

How do I get asshats who've added me to their circles to fuck off?
How do I change my cover a) back to the default, or b) something wide and relatively short; I can't seem to control the dimensions of my cover image.

[jstrodel]

I used to use Slackware Linux like 10 years ago and FreeBSD. Have used Ubuntu more recently. Looking forward to playing with the extremely strong suite of text processing tools (perl, sed, awk, grep, and all the UNIX computer science crap in C/C++ etc) when I get into computational linguistics combined with the easy integration with SQL. Have played with PHP and MySQL somewhat in the last year but havn't gotten deep into it.

I think *NIX is the best platform to code on. I wrote a big app deployment app for a PC retailer and spent 1/2 the time figuring out stupid aspects of how to get the GUI to work! *NIX makes things a lot more simple.

I don't really see any intrinsic value to technology the way I used to and feel like it is sort of a waste of time if I'm not making money or doing something productive.

[Angrboda]

Anybody know how good the NTFS drivers in the linux kernel are? Some statements on Wikipedia leave me skittish about using NTFS-3G, I'm wondering if the kernel drivers are better or worse. ("Current versions often show 100% CPU utilization on dealing with big files on fragmented NTFS file systems." - Wiki, NTFS-3G)

[Jackalope]

Anybody know how good the NTFS drivers in the linux kernel are? Some statements on Wikipedia leave me skittish about using NTFS-3G, I'm wondering if the kernel drivers are better or worse. ("Current versions often show 100% CPU utilization on dealing with big files on fragmented NTFS file systems." - Wiki, NTFS-3G)

I don't know how good they are now, or how accurate those statements are relative to the state of kernels today, but back in the day, the NTFS drivers were absolute shit. Though that was on relatively early 2.6 and 2.4 kernels, and I would not be surprised if the situation had improved. I haven't had a need or desire to mount NTFS (except on a windows machine) in many years.

[pocaracas]

I recently (~February) migrated from winXP to Fedora 18, keeping it dualboot.... but only using linux since the migration.
I have the habit of having a partition for the OS and another for programs, documents and downloaded files/programs/multimedia.
Because of that, I have a NTFS partition with the windows OS, a ext3... or one of those new partitions linux uses... and another NTFS where I put documents I want accessible by both OSes.
I'm not 100% sure of how fedora is accessing the NTFS, but I'd wager NTFS-3g. I have a lot of files in there and some are CD image files of ~700MB.... I may have one or two DVD images weighing some 4GB and I haven't yet noticed any slow access to the disk.
I have apache serving a mediaWiki site which is stored on the NTFS partition and... well... it works, try http://pocawiki.no-ip.org

[Autumnlicious]

NTFS-3G is said to perform better than NTFS.sys adapted through a translation layer.

[Angrboda]

I'll have to re-evaluate my options. For a time, before the 3ware controller, the file server was running FBSD with samba. It's been running win2k server for 6 years, but the motherboard is USB 2.0, and I'd like to add a card or two of USB 3.0, but the drivers aren't working in win2k server. I installed a test install of 2k3, thinking I might upgrade, but the driver support and such for 2k3 seems mixed. I've yet to take a look at Home server. My main concern is being able to remotely admin the box. (I may just put a copy of WinXP on there, if I don't find a suitable server product.)

It will be another week or two before I get all the data migrated anyway. (I'm replacing a mixed set of 7 400/500 GB drives with a set of 8 500 gb drives in the main array. I have three 2 TB drives for an additional RAID 5 array, but I'm thinking I should add another drive to that array (on a 4 port controller). I've got several external 2 TB drives I could sacrifice for the greater good. Then I've got a pair of 3 TB externals, one of which I'll likely set up as an internal/external pair somewhere down the road. Somewhere in the mix, I hope to put my new workstation together... [I'm getting more active in book clubs after 4 months of depression, so progress on computer junk is sporadic])


On the tablet front, I'm zeroing in on an Asus Transformer Infinity in either 16 or 32 GB. It's got a high res display, microSD card slot, and the option of adding a keyboard later. (I've got a little bluetooth keyboard for whatever tablet, as the add on keyboard is pricey.) I'm still half considering the Nexus 10, or, possibly an iPad. The iPad seems unlikely though; the price is higher, and I prefer the android app market to the Apple crap.


And.... I'm looking at upgrading my mp3 player. I've got a set of bluetooth headphones and a bluetooth dongle, but they disconnect regularly; not sure which is at fault. I've got an ipod nano 16 GB that I'm "borrowing" from Target. (It was $149 with a free $15 gift card, so roughly $145 total. I notice the Touch is only $188 online. I've got a bid in on a used Cowon S9 on ebay, and this morning Newegg sent me a coupon for 15% off select ipod products, good through the 21st. [the ebay auction ends in 5 days]. Complexity just seems to follow me around.....) I just checked, with my coupon I can get the nano for $118 from Newegg. Last I checked on the Cowon, I was close to being outbid anyway. I could ask the seller to cancel my bid. Oop, no need.


And I won my auction for one of those pink pogoplug devices. So I've got two of those, and one of the lesser pogoplug mobiles. (I want to root one of the big ones for a web server. This way, even if I brick one of them, no biggie.)


Well that's fucking stupid. I can get the ipod touch in white for $170, but if I try to order the black one, I can't use my coupon because there's a free "combo offer" attached to it. (A portable speaker egg.) I prefer the nano form factor, but I don't know what all I'd get with the touch, but I do know I'd want it in black. *sigh*