Back to Linux and a stable life

Some of you might remember a few posts back how I was talking about Linux and switching over to it. 

Well not to long after that I had a change of direction at my job and was placed more in a pure Windows centric environment. I moved my Linux fixation to a “hobby” status and focused primarily on Windows.

Tux, the Linux penguin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I retooled my home desktop system and geared toward that environment but recently I suffered a nasty, nasty Windows OS crash courtesy of a virus that trashed the file system that literally left my system useless. I wasn't even able to get to the storage partition using alternate tools to recover some data. So I got to thinking about it and with the exposure I've had over the past few months to virtualization I decided it's back to Linux.

What I'm going to talk about here, you can do yourself as well, I did learn a few things during this adventure that I will share with you because I feel you will need to take these things into consideration if you decide to follow this route. The biggest tip I can give you is to architect your new setup first! This is a simple task, just open a text editor of your choice and start jotting things down of what you want to do. Choose what OS will do what and make a plan off that. Save it to a USB stick so you can access from anywhere and go from there. This helps keep you organized and on track and allows you to get it done even if you get distracted or like me, get deeply involved in a part of it you forget what else you were going to do.

Español: Logo Linux Mint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the crash I decided to make Linux Mint (the Cinnamon edition) v14.1 (the latest) as my primary host operating system. I chose Mint because I like the dark look of Cinnamon and I don't have to muck around with trying to find a compatible theme from somewhere. I also like it's layout, it has a solid “Windows” feel but with a splash of Ubuntu flavor. The biggest draw to Mint is the ease I found in migrating from Windows 7 to Linux. They have done a really nice job of laying out the interface in a pretty similar fashion to how Windows 7 currently is. Really all you need to do is just stop, think for a moment about where something was located in Windows 7 and look at your options in Mint and logically make the association. The name may be different but it's pretty much like Win7 in that respect.

Hackintosh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As for my Windows systems I decided to virtualize them. Utilizing Virtualbox, I can set up my Windows systems and be able to access and use them as before. I also decided to throw in a Hackintosh as well for fun. (A Hackintosh is running Mac OS on your PC.) Now, I haven't had much luck getting the Hackintosh to work but thats either due to hardware issues or just my lack of knowledge on the subject.

NOTE ABOUT HARDWARE:

Hardware plays a big factor in this. The biggest issue I've ran into is RAM. My system is a little older and uses DDR2 type memory and my system can support up to 8GB. If you're going to try this setup yourself, I highly recommend maxing out the RAM in your system but if you have a system that doesn't support anything newer than DDR2, you might look into just buying or building yourself a new system. My system will support a maximum of 8GB and to upgrade from the 4GB I have now I need two 4GB sticks. I haven't found any for under $200!

Another thing to consider is the processor and video card. I have a pure AMD/ATI system. Phenom II Black edition processor, ATI video card and MSI motherboard with AMD chipset. This system does rock from a hardware standpoint and screams like crazy under Windows. However, I have found that AMD isn't greatly supported in Linux or Mac OS. So yes, a new system is in the future for me but not for a couple of years. It will probably be Intel and Nvidia based,

BACK TO THE MAIN ARTICLE:

So here is my plan for my new system.

Linux Mint v14.1 (Cinnamon) as the primary OS

5 Virtual systems in Oracle Virtualbox

Windows 7 Pro

Windows 8 Pro (my laptop, I hate 8 but I paid for it so might as well keep a “test” instance around.)

Windows XP (I still support some users on it)

Mac OSX (Hackintosh)

DOS 6.22 (Hey, it's fun to play with!)

Each system serves a purpose, one is for work (the thing that pays my bills), one for play, another for supporting my hobby and the others are just for fun.

Linux in itself has some really good applications and now that you can access the Ubuntu repository and install applications from there over a web page, that makes it even better! Linux is also more stable and not as prone to virus attacks like Windows is so having that as the primary OS makes sense as it will be able to last longer and less maintenance for me to have to do. Having the other OS's in VMs allows me to make the base install, snapshot it and have a good, clean version to roll back to in case they go toes up on me.

The other good thing about having Linux as the primary OS is that my system runs 10 degrees cooler and without a browser open it uses just under 700MB of memory! This is good when you want to run virtual systems, if the host OS is not eating up the RAM then that allows you to allocate a little more to your VM which helps it run better and makes your experience using it that more enjoyable.

If you decide to clone an existing Windows system to a VM you may run into a couple of issues, for example, hardware and activation. My laptop is a Intel Celeron system so it has the Intel stuff installed. It runs fine but I need to update that so it runs better on my AMD system. It also wants to reactivate and won't do it over the internet. Theres a couple of ways to get around this but I'm waiting to get my new RAM before I do anything since Microsoft tends to be jerks about this sort of stuff. If I reactivate it now and then change some hardware It may trigger the reactivation process. Personally I think this is BS and since I paid for the operating system license, I should be able to relocate it to a new machine and deactivate the old one without issue. Although I did read an article on how Microshaft works the activation code. Apparently in Windows 8 it's tied to the bios and doesn't make the license transferable to a new machine. I have to research this a little more but from the way it sounds, a Windows 8 VM is NOT in my future.

As of this posting I'm still in the process of getting everything completed and I'll post a follow up once I'm done and have been using it for a while to let you all know how it's going. I still have some other things I want to try like running BOIC in the background and setting up an Amahi server on it. Amahi is primarily for Ubuntu server but Mint is based off Ubuntu so we'll see how it goes.  

UPDATE:
So I was doing a little testing and as smart and functional my system design sounds I have a major problem with the hardware. Turns out, my VMs can't recognize my hardware or utilize any of the drivers for it but can only use the basic drivers. I'm not really blaming Linux for this but the hardware manufactures. AMD and ATI really aren't that interested (or so it seems) in supporting Linux. I love AMD processors and feel they are way ahead of Intel but without the proper support they're pretty much useless. So, I have decided to shelf this design for now, switch back to Windows 7 as I want to do a few things that I really want to take advantage of my hardware (Photoshop & gaming) and start designing and building a new system based off Intel and NVidia.