Our meeting was held on Thursday, July 3rd, 6:30 PM, in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. On the agenda, new virtualization platforms - VirtualBox and Proxmox VE, Ubuntu discussion, SuSE 11.0 release and other points of interest.
We had a great meeting as we started off with a presentation on VirtualBox from Sun... Click on read more for the complete report.
Based on some comments from others at the meeting, VirtualBox (VB) has been used internally by Sun for a long time and was just recently released freely as a virtualization platform that will run on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris. The maturity of VB shows in that it is not only comparable to the non-free Vmware Workstation in its ability to manage snapshots but also features support of usb and sound along with Mouse integration (with guest additions). Jim M., a local Linux System Administrator had these comments about VB: “I have started using VirtualBox my self. Here are the main reasons. 1. Supports most if not all the Linux distros. 2. Supports sound. 3. Supports video 4. Supports USB. MS Virtual PC did not support the video, sound or USB. Xen has never worked properly (probably due to the hardware I was issued to run it). And while VMware does work but it is cumbersome.” Clint showed many of features and went through the creation of a virtual machine. His demo system was build on Ubuntu 6.01.1 Server to which he had added the gnome-desktop for the graphical interface. One of his virtual machines was Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop. One of those present downloaded and installed VirtualBox during the meeting. Since that time, I have succesfully installed Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 (respin) as well as made significant updates to the 7.10 vm along with 6 snapshots and used one of the snapshots to get back to a starting point as things started going bad with one of the updates I was doing. A couple of resources, http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads where you get VB and the comprehensive 213 page user manual (PDF). Also, checkout http://virtualbox.wordpress.com/ where you can images and instructions on how to install the guest additions on Ubuntu which I found very usefull.
Clint also did a presentation on Proxmox VE but was hampered by not being able to get to his VE machine at the office. VE is a 64 bit virtualization platform which can only be installed on computers with 64 bit processors such as an Athlon 64 3000+ or better. VE is a very strong virtualization platform that is completely web accessible through a web browser and a java based console applet, and you can get images directly from Proxmox to get you started. The LUG members over at http://www.montanalinux.org/ have done and documented a lot of work with VE including scripts to convert physical machines and VMware virtual machines for use on Proxmox VE. Download, images, documentation can be found at http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page. Be aware that the iso install requires a dedicated system, will wipe the hard drive, and you should have at least a 2 couple of GB of RAM to make good use of the system.
We were then given a very enlightening tour of the free nxclient remote control client by Lisa N. Lisa had just started attending our meetings recently but showed herself to be very knowledgeable in Linux Administration. She now only showed us what can be done using nxclient in easily remote controlling computers on her home network but also the speed of the nxclient which is impressively fast! She uses Fedora 9 on all her computers including her firewalled gateway at home where she gave us a brief view of her firewall configuration on that system. Nxclient uses ssh and support x forwarding. You can get more information on the nxclient at http://www.nomachine.com/download.php. Thanks go to Lisa for her spontaneous demonstration and we hope to hear more from her at future meetings.