{"id":1553,"date":"2007-07-05T21:03:57","date_gmt":"2007-07-06T00:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1553"},"modified":"2007-10-06T07:18:16","modified_gmt":"2007-10-06T10:18:16","slug":"virtualization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1553","title":{"rendered":"Virtualization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Y<\/span>esterday, the VM Player and Ubuntu<\/a>BBC had an article about the data ticking timebomb<\/a>: the problem that old digital files are getting less accessible because these files can’t be read by newer versions of software. This particularly happens with proprietary binary file formats:\n<\/p>\n

The pace of software and hardware developments means we are living in the world of a ticking time bomb when it comes to digital preservation\n<\/p>\n

The article goes (indepth) about the two XML document formats (Microsoft’s OpenXML and the independent ODF) that could solve the data problems. Interestingly, the article contains a video with a demo of Microsoft’s Virtual PC<\/a> which (finally) convinced me to try out both Virtual PC and VMPlayer<\/a> (VMWare). To make it short: VMPlayer obviously wins. Well, half-and-half.\n<\/p>\n

The difference is evident: Virtual PC emulates a standard stock PC: you can assign more memory, diskspace but there’s nothing you can do about the video. Apparently, Virtual PC emulates a ‘stock’ S3 VGA card. On the other hand: In Virtual PC it’s easy to create a virtual machine: in no time I had a Debian Sarge server running using the regular installation disks. This is absolutely educational: However, as said before, don’t count on using ‘fancy-smancy’ KDE or Gnome on Virtual PC.\n<\/p>\n

VMWare’s VM Player, a huge install with many additional components, takes a different approach: you can’t create ‘Appliances’ (virtual machines) from the Player itself (you need the VM Server and the VM converter tool for that I think) but you can try many of the pre-made appliances at the ‘Appliance marketplace’<\/a>. You can literally find hundreds of ‘appliances’; ranging from snapshots of complete Linux OSes to firewalls (most of them naturally based on Linux or BSD). For example, how about a Zimbra virtual machine<\/a>, a WordPress Jumpbox<\/a>, (working) Postgres appliances (~14 MB), backup servers, firewalls and what not. If you run VM Server, imagine the devices you can run and actually use. This is, as they say in ‘nerd land’ “Good Stuff”.\n<\/p>\n

In a couple of hours, I expect the download of the desktop version of Ubuntu to be finished. More on this later, I hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, the BBC had an article about the data ticking timebomb: the problem that old digital files are getting less accessible because these files can’t be read by newer versions of software. This particularly happens with proprietary binary file formats: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[130,131],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}