Just sharing some of my inconsequential lunch conversations with you... RSS  

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Conciliating Windows and Linux

A good friend and colleague of mine - lets call him 'Mister M' - just hates Windows. As we only work on Windows, 'Mister M' lives a miserable life on our office, always complaining about how Windows sucks, opposed to his preferred Linux. If you're reading this post on my blog, I got his permission to post.

6 months ago, after installing a UMTS card, 'Mister M's laptop started freezing every now and then, making 'Mister M' love Windows even less. I've asked him why didn't he installed a Linux? He was afraid loosing his 'corporate' Windows installation, packed with Outlook, an ERP client, a CRM client and some LOB applications. I then asked him why didn't he virtualized his Windows installation?

After 6 months of recurring freezes and some of my 'peer pressure' he just did it! Here's what we did:

  1. Used VMWare Converter to get his Windows 'corporate' installation into another box;
  2. Made sure his Windows 'corporate' installation worked fine;
  3. Installed an Ubuntu 7.10;
  4. Installed VMWare player on Ubuntu;
  5. Copied his Windows 'corporate' installation image back into his laptop;
Et voilá! He now has the best of both worlds. And better yet, he will (hopefully) stop nagging me about how unstable his Windows is!

I would like to do it on a Mac OS X, not because Mac OS is a better OS, but because I believe that we can learn a lot about how diversity can help us looking out for better solutions.

This pattern is an interesting one, but doesn't stop here: in a near future, desktop OSs will most probably run over a thin hipervisor, guaranteeing the isolation, maintenance performance and parallelization of several OSs.

PS: while installing Ubuntu he still nagged about how Windows would made him restart after software update. I've told him Ubuntu would also do it. As it did :)

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