I'm the lead developer at The Onion. When I'm not working I enjoy long moonlit walks along the beach with robots, the history of science and technology, and warm fuzzy kittens.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein

Xfce and VMWare vs Parallels

by Jeffrey Weston, Sun Oct 26 9:09 pm, 2008

In my effort to de-clutter over the last month I got rid of a few extraneous machines. Was I ever really going to get that Beowulf Cluster going? Probably not. Not unless I get laid off (and maybe I'm hoping since I haven't had any real serious time off in about a decade). Point is, I like to poke around. So one machine I couldn't bear to part with is my old A21 ThinkPad -- which, hands down, is the best piece of hardware I've ever owned, although the extremely square display is kinda funny in retrospect. Fact it still works perfectly, case in point. I wondered what Xfce is up to -- haven't seen it in a very long time and there's Ubuntu with a nice little xubuntu roll-up. One small CD later, and one completely painless install later, my ThinkPad is running Ubuntu/Xfce -- and damn fast. An 8 year old p3 laptop with 512 ram, and it's as usable and as fast as my mac. There's a minimal and simple quality to Xfce I just love, it's fantastic. Really, you want Compiz Fusion? How can you get any work done with things moving around like that? Just fluff, IMHO. Don't hide my tools, don't make them slide or bounce or skitter away, just put everything out there as simply as possible, now that's usable. But I'm also not really going to be carrying around my ThinkPad anymore, cuz it weighs, I dunno like 10 pounds or something? I want a VM of it, for work, and on my mac. I've been using Parallels, and I haven't had strong opinions about it. I'd tried to do an Ubuntu install on it a while ago and it wouldn't take, this time it did. But here's the thing, after I installed, I thought, well why not do a Parallels update? It's right there in the menu. There's updates to do, I do them. Should I have read more about them, perhaps. But who does? Turns out my key for the latest update (or 'version') doesn't work -- in other words, I've converted my VM image to something that won't work with the previous version (for which I've paid), my previous version (for which I've paid) is gone, and I can't get into my VM now. Ummm, Kay. If my activated copy of Parallels wouldn't work with whatever updates they're giving me I feel they're somewhat obliged to stop me from installing and converting my current VM's without first buying the upgrade. Assuming folks are reading the fine print on a update is not good. Enough of that, off to VMWare. The VMWare Fusion demo imports my parallels xubuntu VM flawlessly. All in all VMWare feels better, I don't have hard numbers to back this up (for instance I don't know if it utilizes memory better than Parallels or not, although these folks seem to have an opinion) -- but interface wise, better. Not giving the full-screen escape code in a tooltip above the full screen button, like Parallels doesn't, is a pain for noobs, or forgetful idiots like myself. Also, getting the vm-tools on for window resizing and 'Unity' was easy -- a menu mounted disk image, a 'sudo perl vmware-tools-install.pl' (Hey somebody's still using Perl!!).