The perfect geek linux/xp desktop setup with VMware?(non mac)

Hey folks… descending into geek land this week. I’ve been having a chat with John Schinker about an idea I had I think I’m going to go ahead and try, but first, I thought I would serve this up to the community and see if anyone other than John had some good ideas on how to refine it before i go through the odyssey of rebuilding my computer.

WARNING –> Any use of this post to build a sucky computer is not my fault! —> I’m no hardware expert… <--- Note on why I said (non Mac)
This description would work fine (presumably) on an Apple. While I realize that many, many smart folks out there love their macs… and this will probably bring on the mac hater haters… contrary to the growing trend, I don’t think Apple has a place in education, and as I currently look into my future, I don’t see buying another one. “Apple users are very happy to make the trade-off from “open” to “closed”, presumably for the ease of use.” This is a pretty fair description of how I feel about their products. Beautiful, but closed. A corollary to this is the fascinating legal issues that pile up around Apple’s closed systems… people suing apple and Apple suing people. See here here and here. I will stick to linux as much as i can, and cheat with windows.

Hardware

I’m currently still running a pentium D 3.4GHZ… I would prefer something like a Core 2 2.67 but that’s not really going to affect this conversation. The most important thing is to have a motherboard with 4 RAM slots and that can handle more than one SATA harddrive. A built in hardware RAID would also be quite nice.

Hardware

E6750 Core 2 DUO 2.67
2 X harddrive (you’d be better off with 10K harddrives, but i’m going to use 2 300GB 7200)
4GB 667GHZ RAM (i don’t really understand RAM…)
256GB dual DVI video card. (suggestions?)
2 20″ panels (currently have a Scepter 20″ and looking to replace my HUGE trinitron with a Samsung 20″ panel)
Motherboard (must have 4 RAM slots, better if it has 2 ethernet ports, firewire, 2-4 SATA slots, onboard hardware RAID)
ergonomic keyboard mouse (i love them)
Sound Card (don’t really use mine)
Speakers (i need new ones…)
DVD burner

Introduction

Here’s where the fun starts. I want to run three operating systems on this computer. I want to install STEP 1 Ubuntu as my base system, STEP 2 on top of a RAID 1 hardware setting. From there, I’m going to STEP 3 install VMware Server. VMware allows you to create virtual operating systems on top of your existing installation. STEP 4 I will be installing Debian and Windows XP. This will give me three operating systems, one that has direct access to the hardware and will be my main system (Ubuntu) and the other two, debian and XP, will be virtual systems living on top of my base system.

STEP 1 installing Ubuntu

I’ve been running ubuntu as my base system here for the last few months. There are a couple of things that I still can’t do with it (notably screencasting) but overall i’m pretty pleased with it, and am willing to live with the mild inconvenience to not see windows popups. I think I’ll install Ubuntu 7.10… I’m not entirely decided yet, I may try kubuntu this time, which may be a little more configured to my particular setup, but this will take a little more reading. The key fact for the installation is to use the inestimable “ubuntuguide“. The single most useful website I have ever found on the internet. I mean it.

STEP 2 Running RAID 1
I know this is kind of backwards, but, there it is. RAID 1 allows you to do what’s called ‘mirroring’. That means that everything that is written to one harddrive is written to the other harddrive at the same time. This means that you are ‘wasting’ 300GB of space, but it also means that if one harddrive fails, all of your data is automagically safe. Now, if your computer gets hit by lightening (which is possible) and they both fail, you’ve still lost everything. And fire… yes if you’re burning your computer this wont save your data… but it will save you from single drive failure.

STEP 3 – Installing VMware server

I’ve just discovered this, have installed it once, and on the strength of that, am thinking of rejigging my whole computer life. That’s how much I like it. Once you’ve got the operating system installed (whether you start with XP or linux) you can then install vmware server on top of it. Using its friendly interface you then carve up new ‘servers’ from which you can run new operating systems. At work, for instance, I now have xp on my desktop with wmware on it. In vmware i’m running a debian installation which i’m using as my test server. I can connect to that server from my desktop (or anywhere else for that matter) a full testing system XP and linux running in the same place at the same time. I love it. And, most importantly, if it starts to act funny, I can wipe out the virtual installation and just pop up a new one. I can also back it up very easily.

I keep hearing that virtualization is the future. I’m thinking that virtualization is the new now. More on this after I play with it for a few weeks… too excited right now for objectivity.

STEP 4 – debian and XP
I love debian as a server. Nice and clean. Super easy to use. I want to install debian as a test environment so i can play with the bunches of server based stuff i like to test out without mucking up more important servers. As soon as I get it configure, I’m going to take an ‘image’ of it, and then, six weeks from now when i wreck it trying to install something crazy, I’ll just reinstall the image. It’ll take few minutes, and I’ll have a clean new testing area, and won’t have to ruin any other important work.
As for XP, there are a few things that I want it for. Screencasting is the first. I’d also like to be able to just print a ‘doc’ file without converting it and having to change the settings. Other than that, I’d rather stick with my ubuntu desktop.

So… there’s my proposal for a new desktop installation. Any comments? Suggestions?

Internet –> democratizing agent? tool for prosocial change?

Hey folks… have spent most of my writing time the last couple of weeks trying to remember how to write an academic paper… but am back here responding to a call from the network. Alec Couros, who I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting but have spent much more time following lately, has sent out two questions to the community.

1) Is the Internet a democratizing agent?
2) How does/can technology be an tool for prosocial change?

These questions have been at the heart of many a heated debate for me over the past few years. I’ve run into several of the ‘evangelist’ type who will go on at length about how the ‘internet brings democracy to the masses’ how blogging ‘is the first truly democratic tool’ and have seen dozens of people’s faces turn purple in response. I don’t like to think of myself as an evangelist, as if the previous sentence hadn’t made that clear… I also don’t believe that ‘giving someone a computer emancipates them.’

I’m going to mush the answers together… ha! it’s my blog! try and stop me!
These questions always scares me, and my mind is always called back to Gutenburg and his printing press. Is the printing press a democratizing agent? Well… it certainly allowed more people to become literate, it allowed for more information to flow around. It allowed more people to be involved in current events (see Martin Luther, a European Christian Reformist, and his 95 theses, which were apparently printed on broadsheets and circulated widely.) Whether that is ‘democratizing’ or not depends on your point of view. Lets leave aside the content for a second and just look at the situation. My understanding is that Luther didn’t organize the publication of the 95 theses (but later organized other publishing) so someone decided what he had to say was important enough to circulate. Someone had enough money to pay for this. Someone had the right literacies to realize that this method would be effective in spreading their cause. The power is centralized but the effect can be generalized. Similar examples could be made for radio or TV.

The internet, however, changes that paradigm a little. The means of production are more generalized. By percentage there are definitely more people able to produce the kind of thing (and have it circulate) than there was with either of the other three mediums mentioned. Several hundred people are subscribed to this blog, no one tells me (directly) that I can’t say anything. but…

There are several other social issues that bind me here. This article from the Chronicle is the classic example of people saying “yes you ‘could’ say anything, but you’d be crazy if you said anything.” How much of what I’m willing to say is bounded by what I’m allowed to say BECAUSE this can circulate anywhere. There is a sense in which you are much free-er to be open and honest when you are not being recorded. The only people who are able to be honest (and not risk jobs or worse in countries where the repercussions are worse) are people with power, people hiding their identity, or people who are willing to take that risk. The first two are not particularly reliable sources, and the latter is particularly rare. I’m also bounded by my culture and my existing literacies. If I’ve been brought up to believe in a certain creed… having access to the internet is not, in and of itself, going to change that. If someone out there (and you know who you are) are constantly saying the same thing over and over again, in the hopes that people will believe it, the internet simply offers more opportunity not only for them to do it, but for the people who have become convinced to go about trying to convince others. Is this democracy? It can certainly be social change… but ‘prosocial’ change? To whom i wonder?

The pure amount of information on the internet also creates certain problems. In a strict sense of ‘democratic’ the fact that everyone is allowed to have a divergent opinion is probably good. However, the nature of the medium is such that, in many cases, you need some kind of angle if you wish to be successful. I’ve personally finally gotten to the point where i really am just writing what i think… but it took a while, and I’m not trying to make money from this site. I’m really just participating in a community. For many of the things I read my question is constantly “WHY has this person published this thing in this particular way…”

I’m not sure that this has come out right… but here is the short answer.

The internet is not a democratizing agent.
Technology can be a tool for social change in exactly the same way anything else is.

At the risk of oversimplifying… the internet is ‘made up of’ people and corporations. The people, through their memberships in communities and networks can do good or bad things depending on the aims of those people and depending on what one individual might see as good or bad. Corporations, by definition, are responsible to make money for their shareholders. If they make money by, say, making democracy widgets, then their activities will be democratizing.

The tools are, as always, amoral. But there are shadings around this too. A gun can help you get fed, or protect you, but, in my country and in many cases, these arguments are pretty weak… unless you live in the Arctic or in northern Ontario, or, or or… Now, a pen can be used to stab someone in the eye, or it can be used to write death threats… but it can occasionally be used for writing shopping lists, or or or

but really. there’s a difference. Pens, I’m pretty comfortable saying, pose less of a threat and are probably better democratizing agents.

The internet, as a technology, is a better potential democratizing agent overall than a book, traditional radio, or tattoos because it’s easier for anyone to ‘produce’ something.

Anyone who has a problem with me using Marxism to explicate democracy may comment as such below. You have the means to produce your comment too… of course, i control those comments…

BWHAHAHAHA!

Final analysis. Kinda. That’s my answer. It can kinda work. I’m currently very worried about corporations taking over the ‘voice’ of the internet. I currently get 25% of my hits about every other month because i have a post relating to myspace at school in my blog. If I had google ads and I posted about leopard right now, I’d probably make more money. And google is really the first smart company in the internet. Where are we going to be in 5 years?

One last word about social justice. That worries me too. I know what I mean about social justice, and everyone else does when they use it too. The problem is… I don’t think we all agree. I avoided the semantical debate in this post… but in the end, it’s the most important.

Democracy? For whom? Is there democracy when people don’t know how to choose? What set of choices to they have to vote from?

Social change? Social Justice?

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.