[HLUG] Virtulisation and file systems

[David Shorthouse]

Having used both Vmware and virtualbox.. my favourite is Virtualbox.I run an 
opensuse 10.3 machine which is an AMD Athlon 1.8Ghz processor with a gig of 
ram it will happily run windows 2000 and vista although a little slugish 
running both.

The advantage of running virtualbox is you can make ir run as if its a native 
linux program so you open the program it loads the virtual machine but you 
dont see the desktop which could be good if thats all you want.. This was one 
of the writups in linux format this month or a couple of months ago.

With Regards to your 500Gig NTFS Drive I dont think you can convert but if you 
do install fat32 please do not use one 500gig partition

The Weather station side. you said that it uses alot of dlls... are these 
installed by the system.. Wine can do some wonderful things if you have the 
time to play...


I hope this helps



Dave
Mental note 18th of June next meeting....



On Monday 09 June 2008 11:09:47 Paul Stenning wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We are looking to rationalise the number of PCs that are on and running
> 24 hours a day, and doing very little most of the time other than
> wasting electricity and generating heat.  Currently we have:
>
> * Windows 2003 R2 file server
> * Ubuntu 7.10 web development server
> * Windows XP weather station PC (uploads data from weather station to
> internet every 15 mins)
> * General "office" PC (Windows XP, probably upgrading to Vista)
>
> I would like to combine the first three into one machine.  The existing
> file server (which has a proper server motherboard with a 3GHz P4, 500GB
> of RAID1 storage and 2GB RAM) can be rebuilt with Ubuntu 8.04 (probably
> server with Gnome added) and used for the file serving and web serving.
>   I would add an extra hard disk for the operating system and use the
> 500GB RAID as /home.  This would get rid of the web dev server, which is
> an old 1.6GHz P4.
>
> This machine also has a DLT tape backup drive and I am currently using
> Backup Exec.  What tape backup options are available Linux; preferably
> point-and-click rather than command line?  I am not expecting to be able
> to restore old BackupExec backups.
>
> We also synchronise it daily to two Maxtor 500GB OneTouch drives (only
> one connected at a time) as a secondary backup.  What Linux software is
> available for that (again point-and-click)?
>
> Is it possible to convert the 500GB drives (within the server and the
> Maxtor USB ones) from NTFS to some file system that Linux supports
> natively, without having to wipe and reformat?  I'm guessing the answer
> is NO there!
>
> Also for the USB ones I would like them to be readable on Windows PCs
> too, so I assume they will need to be FAT32?  Or is Linux write support
> for NTFS reliable now?
>
> The weather station software is Windows only, and won't run on Vista (so
> can't go on the office PC when updated).  This has to remain on either
> Windows XP or Windows 2000.  However it's system resource usage is
> light.  This is the problem one.
>
> I would like to run this as a virtual machine on the Ubuntu server, but
> I need to sort out whether it will communicate with the weather station
> OK this way.  The interface is USB.  Does anyone know what the situation
> is with virtualisation environments such as VMware or VirtualBox with
> regard to accessing physical USB ports from the guest operating system?
>   I don't think WINE is viable for this as the weather station software
> is a bit iffy and uses loads of DLLs etc.
>
> If this will work then we will have one server handling all that, plus
> the "office" PC for office stuff.
>
> Sorry for the long email.....  Thoughts anyone, please?
>
> Thanks,
> Paul.