JDPFu.com 2025

The FLOSS Weekly podcast did an entire episode on VirtualBox recently. There were some interesting comments in the podcast from the VBox team.

The team believes they are the closest to native for both network and storage virtualization. They recommended a number of specific NICs and how to connect to storage that does not disagree with my Improve VirtualBox Performance by almost 50% article. That was good to hear.

They talked about:

1. Oracle’s commitment to VirtualBox
2. Virtualization Overview (why, features, security, virtualized hardware, etc)
   1. Most interesting to me was that VBox supports OpenGL 2.x – that means XBMC should run in a vbox VM.
3. Differences between the OSE and PEUL licenses – what is contained in just the PEUL?
4. vboxmanage and how 3rd party folks have written some nice tools
5. Teleportation (V-Motion like) that does not require identical
6. Page-Fusion – shared memory across guest OSes (this was new to me). The intent is to support hundreds of client VMs per server.
7. Mac virtualization challenges – it works, but only on Mac hardware due to Apple DRM in hardware checks.

Anyway, find the VirtualBox specific podcast here.
A link to the show notes

By the way, if you are a dentist, FLOSS Weekly has nothing to do with teeth. FLOSS is *F*ree *L*ibre *O*pen *S*ource *S*oftware.

Over the years, we all come across software that we decide to uninstall and never use again (unless forced to do so by a company). I expect that some software on my hate it list is loved by someone. Most of those tools that make it to this list became bloated, lost their core purpose or did something nasty like installed a search bar or some other spyware.

Anyway, here’s my list for Windows.

Each of us use a computer for various reasons. Some just want a system that works, without any hassle. Most of us want to run specific software, work with specific file types, connect with everyone else, and possibly just do what the people around us are doing to be the same.

I’ll be as honest as I can and put the reasons in order.

Some of you know that I’m a fan of Linux. Ok, so that is an understatement. Would you like to convert? I’ll help you! Linux lets me do what I want while still providing nearly complete control over the hardware, for free. I like it and I’m shocked when other computer users don’t like it too. In fact, I think that almost every Grandmother should be running Linux these days.

Here’s a story, Linux Experiment Gone Horribly … Perfect, about a tech trying to solve problems with a client’s laptop. After exhausting all other solutions to a virus infected, spyware running, root kit loving Vista install, he got to the point of needing to reinstall Vista, but no reinstall disks were available. The client didn’t have them or any backup. The answer? Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

In short, unsophisticated computer users will probably do better with a properly configured Linux system. I’d try Ubuntu, Mint or PCLinux on end users for the best outcomes. All are based on Debian, very stable and work on almost any hardware.

Would you like to try Linux? I’ll help you!

Below are a few incidents that I’m personally aware of which impacted a few different projects. Some are from my personal desktop to production dispatching systems with 20K+ users to some that impacted a space shuttle launch data.

People like Top 10 Lists, but I could think of only 9 near disasters. Perhaps something interesting will happen this week? ;)

Ooops – beep, beep, beep ….

The Best Linux Commercial that you’ve never seen.

Parts of it are clearly written by the marketing team, since it isn’t really 100% true and the performance displayed seems to be sped up 20%, but still it is a nice, slick looking commercial.

I wish they’d said – 30,000+ applications, instead of thousands of applications and pointing out that updates to all of them are handled centrally OR automatically, if you prefer. Synaptic for 10.04 shows over 30,000 packages now. Still, it is a very good view of what Linux and Ubuntu can accomplish today.

Dell needs to get some balls in their dealings with Microsoft.

Some more Linux commercials

I came across a short article on the Free Software Foundation building a federated social network solution and figured a few of my readers would be interested.

How do you deal with abusive web aggregators?

You know, those automatic programs that search out and grab web content so that others can see it? Usually, this is a good thing for a web site, since it makes your content visible to others that wouldn’t normally see it. That is, until it becomes abusive.

I’ve been interested in saving some money on home phone service since around 2001 when I dropped the babybell service for a VoIP solution. Over the years, I’ve switched providers and ended up with the cable company phone service to get the best quality for the buck. Now they’ve raised the prices and I’m looking again. I’m not interested in Vonage at $25/month when a $3/month plan will cover me. Further, I already own the necessary equipment to get this all working. You may already own the equipment too.

It always seemed that a $3/month SkypeOut account could be linked to a PBX (Asterisk/FOSS) to make this happen. A few months ago, I asked about this on Lifehacker, but didn’t get any acceptable answers.

How to Ask a Smart Question.

After reading a 2 pg rant from a new Linux user complaining that his questions were not being answered, I did a little googling and found a post on how to ask a smart question. I added a link here mainly so I could review it later, when I needed to ask a smart question.