Skip to main content

VMware Euphoria

I've been playing around with VMware since about 2000, but I've never had a computer powerful enough to really run it. Yesterday, I bought another 1gig stick of RAM for my MacBook, which puts me at 2gigs. That's not a heck of a lot, but it's enough.

I now have OS X, Ubuntu, and NetBSD running full screen on different OS X Spaces. I setup VMware Fusion to allow Ubuntu to use both CPUs and 1gig of RAM, whereas I only allocated 1 CPU and 256mb of RAM for NetBSD. OS X does fine with whatever the other two don't use. Ubuntu now has enough horsepower that I can even play the video game I wrote at full speed.

With a simple hot key, I can be in OS X, Ubuntu, or NetBSD. Even better: I can shut the lid of my laptop, and all three suspend without crashing. They all share my Mac's wireless connection, which tends to be pretty stable. If something is giving me a hard time installing under MacPorts, I can just install it on Ubuntu.

Being a minimalist, I only have one computer, so it's kind of hard to play around with fringe OSs, which I used to love doing. That's about to change. Next up, MINIX 3 and pc-bsd!

Oh my gosh that's cool!!!
Labels:

Comments

Jonas Beckman said…
Hi! I am a Fusion fan too. Great stuff: using Spaces to switch between different operations systems running full screen, not having to worry about suspend, using the Mac's great connectivity... everytime I demo my workstation people are envious. Currently I am running Ubuntu 8.10, Debian 4.0, Windows XP and a VM machine dedicate to Smalltalk, Seaside and Gemstone hacking.

Like you I have used Vmware stuff for several years. When Fusion 2.0 added multiple snapshots I think it became not only a great consumer product but a serious developer tool.

BTW, are you using the networking between the virtual machines? Using one as a server and the others as clients or testing multiple server setups?
12:51 PM
jjinux said…
> BTW, are you using the networking between the virtual machines? Using one as a server and the others as clients or testing multiple server setups?

Not yet, but I hope to. That'd be a great way to play with some distributed computing under Erlang.
1:10 PM
jjinux said…
VMware crashed on me. FreeBSD was leaving X and going back to terminal mode at the same time I went from full-screen to a normal-sized window. It seemed to restart automatically, which was weird. I could be remembering that part incorrectly.
1:14 AM
jjinux said…
Ugh, Ubuntu upgraded its kernel, and now it won't restart :( It's completely stuck.
6:16 PM
jjinux said…
Hmm, it may have been my fault. I'm at Starbucks. I wonder if the wonky network connection at Starbucks could conceivably cause the problem. I deleted the virtual machine. Now I'll never know :(
6:27 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 20.04 on a 2015 15" MacBook Pro

I decided to give Ubuntu 20.04 a try on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro. I didn't actually install it; I just live booted from a USB thumb drive which was enough to try out everything I wanted. In summary, it's not perfect, and issues with my camera would prevent me from switching, but given the right hardware, I think it's a really viable option. The first thing I wanted to try was what would happen if I plugged in a non-HiDPI screen given that my laptop has a HiDPI screen. Without sub-pixel scaling, whatever scale rate I picked for one screen would apply to the other. However, once I turned on sub-pixel scaling, I was able to pick different scale rates for the internal and external displays. That looked ok. I tried plugging in and unplugging multiple times, and it didn't crash. I doubt it'd work with my Thunderbolt display at work, but it worked fine for my HDMI displays at home. I even plugged it into my TV, and it stuck to the 100% scaling I picked for the othe
1 comment
Read more

ERNOS: Erlang Networked Operating System

I've been reading Dreaming in Code lately, and I really like it. If you're not a dreamer, you may safely skip the rest of this post ;) In Chapter 10, "Engineers and Artists", Alan Kay, John Backus, and Jaron Lanier really got me thinking. I've also been thinking a lot about Minix 3 , Erlang , and the original Lisp machine . The ideas are beginning to synthesize into something cohesive--more than just the sum of their parts. Now, I'm sure that many of these ideas have already been envisioned within Tunes.org , LLVM , Microsoft's Singularity project, or in some other place that I haven't managed to discover or fully read, but I'm going to blog them anyway. Rather than wax philosophical, let me just dump out some ideas: Start with Minix 3. It's a new microkernel, and it's meant for real use, unlike the original Minix. "This new OS is extremely small, with the part that runs in kernel mode under 4000 lines of executable code.&quo
50 comments
Read more

Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B
4 comments
Read more