Distro dance (was: FTP / wget)

[Jarod Wilson]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 17:09 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 9:33 AM,  <bruce.labitt at autoliv.com> wrote:
> > Once I get everything going again I think I will reinstall
> > Ubuntu 64 bit since it seems to support newer hardware and applications -
> > at least for the ones that I need.
[...]
>   Xen (one of Linux's native VM mechanisms) is free and Free, and is
> probably a better choice.  I've seen it demoed, and I've read what
> others are doing with it, and it seems powerful and capable.  I've
> never used it myself, but I know others on this list have, and they
> can hopefully assist.  Come to think of it, I'd expect Xen to have
> pretty GUIs by now, too.  One thing I don't know about is what Ubuntu
> + Xen equals, but Google suggests it is supported.

Anything + Xen is on my list of things I'd rather not ever have to touch
ever again. Most distros are highly favoring KVM these days. It does
require hardware virtualization support in the system's processor
though. (look in /proc/cpuinfo for svm and vmx cpu flags on amd and
intel systems respectively).

Why do I dislike Xen? Still no dom0 support upstream, still requires a
hypervisor that reimplements (often badly) core kernel functionality
(such as acpi and freq scaling support). KVM is entirely upstream. And
the same GUI most distros use for Xen these days (virt-manager) works
pretty much identically with KVM.

Another alternative to VMware if the system cpu doesn't have hardware
virt support is of course VirtualBox.

--jarod