Re: New to Linux
On 12 April 2011 16:34, shawn wilson <ag4ve.us@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Chris Brennan <xaero@xaerolimit.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 10:12 AM, shawn wilson <ag4ve.us@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> another thing about times changing - virtuals are great. download some
>>> popular distros (don't limit yourself to linux either). i'd suggest
>>> debian, fedora, centos, ubuntu, and freebsd. then get virtual box and
>>> have fun. go, install, snapshot and then mess everything up. if you
>>> can't figure out how to put it back together again, revert to the
>>> snapshot.
I suggest Debian, CentOS and a BSD are enough to get started with :-)
No need to scare the chap off /that/ soon ;-)
>> You'll need VMWare or VirtualBox (VBox is free but because it's not Oracle
>> owned, it's licence might radically change without warning ... If you
>> *really* want to make a project out of it, try Gentoo too, fair warning
>> though, it can be time consuming.
>
> virtualbox, vmware, xen, hyperv, kvm, qemu, virtual iron (are they
> still in business?)
They got borged by Oracle, IIRC, leaving them with at least 3
different virtual platforms: virtualbox, solaris zones, virtual iron.
Ooo, and maybe one more whose name escapes me. They also bought up
Q-Layer, who were *great* ... and then dropped it entirely.
OVM - that's what I was thinking of. Oracle VM, a RHEL-based Xen
product with a web UI. Not too shabby, but why would you /bother/?
> and i'm probably missing some others. the reason
> i just mentioned virtualbox is because it's easy. there is also
> proxmox which is a bare metal environment but that requires spare
> hardware and isn't as mature as virtualbox.
>
> per the source of virtualbox - oracle owns it. however, it is all
> under a gpl type license exept the usb driver which is close source.
ISTR there are some more exceptions than /just/ USB, but can't recall
them at the moment.
I'd honestly not recommend an Oracle-owned product at this point.
They're showing themselves to be too hostile to FLOSS to trust them.
And while I /know/ virtualbox is good and useful, the (relatively
small!) extra work required to get KVM+libvirt (i.e. virt-manager)
going will repay you many times over for the greater control and
understanding you'll have of the underlying system. IMHO.
Jonathan
--
Jonathan Matthews
London, UK
http://www.jpluscplusm.com/contact.html
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