[clue-tech] how much room?

[Peter Kuykendall]

I'm writing this on MS OE in an XP VM under an Ubuntu host.  It's all 
running on a middlin' Dell laptop with 1 GB RAM and a 1.6 Ghz CPU which 
spends most of its time at 800 Mhz.

I was driven to this solution due to MS' most recent breakage of their 
Hotmail web interface with non-MS browsers.  I've been using various kluges 
under Ubuntu for some years now (currently stable hotsmtp and hotpop, buggy 
Thunderbird webmail), but there's a lot of dark talk about MS scheming to 
break those in the near future.  So I threw in the towel and started running 
the XP VM with OE.  It actually works perfectly.  I had forgotten how well 
it works during the last 3-4 years of Linux-only operation.

I have a valid XP license because Dell forced me to buy it if I wanted to 
buy this machine (exactly a year ago; I hear that they are a little more 
sane now).  As soon as I bought the machine I archived the hard drive and 
then blew it away and installed Ubuntu.  I then went to piratebay.org and 
downloaded a torrent file which points to a VERY lean XP VM.  That's a good 
solution because some other poor schmuck already did the hard work of 
stripping down XP. :)

I also occasionaly have need to use Visio, and there's no fully compatible 
Linux solution for that yet, so the XP VM gets used occasionally for that as 
well.

I have it configured to use 256 MB of RAM.  Both the Ubuntu host and the VM 
seem happy with this arraingement.

- Pete

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at verizon.net>
To: "CLUE tech" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 1:33 PM
Subject: Re: [clue-tech] how much room?


> On Thursday 20 November 2008 03:09:01 pm Nate Duehr wrote:
>> Roy J. Tellason wrote:
>> > However I've had the occasional idle thought that it might be good for 
>> > me
>> > to have XP on some box somewhere,  just to be able to refer to it or
>> > maybe run an app that wouldn't run any other way or whatever the case 
>> > may
>> > be.  So I decided to leave it on this box,  though with way less space
>> > than the whole drive it was using to begin with.
>>
>> In this case, when I was gung-ho about having Linux be "primary" and
>> Windows as an add-on that was rarely used (also how I handle this on OSX
>> machines), I like using Virtualization and a disk "file" instead of
>> giving Windows its own partition.
>
> That's something that I haven't played with at all yet.  How much of a 
> machine
> does that need to work well?  This is only like a 1 GHz or so machine...
>
>> That way the "image" can be made bigger if needed, by whatever mechanism
>> the virtualization tool uses -- that is either easy or hard depending on
>> whether or not you have to reinstall Windows on a new image, etc... but
>> basically the "Windows disk" just takes up filesystem space on the
>> "host" OS instead of having to mess with partitioning if you use
>> Virtualization and don't mind the performance hit.
>
> Sounds good,  but how much of a performance hit is the big question I 
> guess.
>
>> If you really want to run Windows "natively" then you have to go with
>> the partitition.  I've gotten away (easily) with partitions about 6 GB
>> big for XP with all service packs, patches, and applications I wanted...
>
> I'm at 3G now and don't plan on installing any other stuff if I can help 
> it...
>
>> but very little room left for big data like an ISO image, etc...
>
> No reason I'd need that under windoze.
>
>> if you only deal with "normal" sized files in Windows, it would work... 
>> if
>> you need space for video or other large files, just take that into 
>> account
>> when you pick your final size.
>
> I can't really see me needing to stick any large files in there.  I just 
> need
> to figure out what else I can clean up in there so I can make it smaller 
> yet.
>
> I don't use that company's product at all,  and don't even know what the
> minimum recommended system requirements are these days.
>
>
> -- 
> Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
> ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
> be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
> -
> Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by 
> lies. --James
> M Dakin
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