Linux is true Freedom in the cyber world.

[Overmind One]

For the type of use you're talking about, you're fine with type-2. Type-1 virtualization is better geared toward hosted VM server farms where you're renting out high volume instances. These have the ability to migrate a live instance seemlessly across hardware without any downtime.

When you say "I need to use the host machine like a workstation", what do you mean exactly?

This is a home setup. I have two HDTVs, both with computers attached to them. In my livingroom, I use this computer to play all my movies and video, to watch Netflix and also to do remote work and edit my websites and play games. Here is a screenshot of that machine, with Windows 8 Pro running in VMware, Under The Dome playing in VLC, my Evolution mail and a web browser showing this site (click to enlarge):



The computer in my bedroom (the Acer touchscreen) is used for gaming, as well as the other stuff I do on the main machine. It is connected to my other HDTV via HDMI and I use that to watch movies or TV series from bed. I also use that one more for teleconferencing. I have been accessing the VMs living on the main machine and opening them up on an instance of Workstation 10 installed on the bedroom computer.

I do not have a third machine I can use to act as a VMware master host, as it would require a robust processor with VT and at least 16gb of RAM. I can easily move the SATA drives to another host machine, but like I said, I dont have the third machine.

 

[Overmind One]

If you don't have many files on the EXT4 partition, shrink it, format the new partition in XFS and move the files over then delete the EXT4 partition and expand XFS. As far as I know, there isn't a direct path to converting EXT4 to XFS.

As for accessing the XFS file system directly from Windows, the easiest and most reliable method would be to run Linux in a virtual instance and serve those partitions up over the network to the Windows instance. I'm not aware of a Windows driver to read XFS partitions.

Yes, you can use Truecrypt to encrypt your XFS partitions.



You wouldn't lose the ability to use them as workstations if you're virtualizing them. If performance is your concern, let the single instance take over all resources.

I experimented with this. I like the way it handles my large video files. Noticeable improvements in writing to the disk. But I could not read the files from Windows. I used an external disk for this test, formatting it to XFS and then writing and reading several files to it. I could not find any solution for reading XFS directly in Windows, but you can set up the host share in VMware from the XFS drives, then map them to any virtual machine, including Windows. Cool! Any improvement is good, although this network is running very efficiently.

I tried encrypting containers within the XFS drive, and it works just fine, as you said. Truecrypt recognizes the XFS drive and will mount it in Linux. I have not tried mapping from that XFS drive to the OSX virtual machine, because that VM is broken at the moment. I need to re-image a new one.

 

[Bluce Ree]

So, here's what happened to me thus far.

My Samsung Series 5 was short circuited, it seems. When the power adapter was plugged in, the power icon showed as "charging" but the battery kept draining. As it turns out, the motherboard was shorted but just the circuitry related to the power supply. Without a schematic, it's pointless trying to fix.

So, I walked into a Tigerdirect store and saw they had a bunch of laptops on a table at customer service that were discounted due to being "open box" and missing power adapters. I found this Sony Vaio Fit 15 marked down from $900 to $500. I offered the dude $400 and I walked out with this laptop.

Now for the good part. First, let me just say that I HATE WINDOWS 8!

I did a complete system restore from the built-in Sony recovery tool. It put back Windows 8 at factory default. Two days later, it forced fed me the Windows 8.1 upgrade, at which point I said to myself, "ok, cool".

Not cool. That's when the nightmare started.

Upgrade failed. Constantly. Every time it finished the upgrade, it would fail and revert changes, which wasted a good hour and a half every single time. Because it's a force-fed update, it kept doing this to me multiple times a day until, finally, my disk got corrupted.

I downloaded Linux Mint, which I find is an excellent desktop Linux, and wiped Windows clean off my laptop.

Not only is Mint 17 smooth on this thing but everything just works. I've had no glitches, hiccups, stuttered browser scrolling, nothing. No issues.

So, to you, Windows, I say go f**k yourself and that fat pig named Balmer on whom you rode in.

 

[Overmind One]

So, here's what happened to me thus far.

My Samsung Series 5 was short circuited, it seems. When the power adapter was plugged in, the power icon showed as "charging" but the battery kept draining. As it turns out, the motherboard was shorted but just the circuitry related to the power supply. Without a schematic, it's pointless trying to fix.

So, I walked into a Tigerdirect store and saw they had a bunch of laptops on a table at customer service that were discounted due to being "open box" and missing power adapters. I found this Sony Vaio Fit 15 marked down from $900 to $500. I offered the dude $400 and I walked out with this laptop.

Now for the good part. First, let me just say that I HATE WINDOWS 8!

I did a complete system restore from the built-in Sony recovery tool. It put back Windows 8 at factory default. Two days later, it forced fed me the Windows 8.1 upgrade, at which point I said to myself, "ok, cool".

Not cool. That's when the nightmare started.

Upgrade failed. Constantly. Every time it finished the upgrade, it would fail and revert changes, which wasted a good hour and a half every single time. Because it's a force-fed update, it kept doing this to me multiple times a day until, finally, my disk got corrupted.

I downloaded Linux Mint, which I find is an excellent desktop Linux, and wiped Windows clean off my laptop.

Not only is Mint 17 smooth on this thing but everything just works. I've had no glitches, hiccups, stuttered browser scrolling, nothing. No issues.

So, to you, Windows, I say go f**k yourself and that fat pig named Balmer on whom you rode in.

Im done with them as a primary operating system. For good. I no longer trust them with security, with stability or with value. I also get it that Average Joe or Average Jane probably does not know anything about Linux, or has heard that it is hard to use and install. Those days are long past, as we know. Linux Mint (I posted a video on it earlier in this thread) is perfect for the Linux newbie. It is perfect for Microsoft evacuees, and especially for people who are on older equipment running Windows XP (Win XP is the most widely used Microsoft OS on earth, and they abandoned it!). Mint will bring that old hardware back to life in a heartbeat. Plus, it's beautiful! I have a VM of it.

 

[Overmind One]

Nooooooooo! You cant shrink an XFS partition???? How asinine! . I went into gparted to see if I could shrink my new XFS partition from 500gb to 250gb, and leave the other partition at 700gb with a 50gb SWAP partition. Right now it is 500/450/50.

But you cant %#$*^! shrink the damned partition after creating it. Even Paragon and Acronis cant do it. Any advice? Is there a way to shrink an XFS partition once it has been created?

 

[Bluce Ree]

Nooooooooo! You cant shrink an XFS partition???? How asinine! . I went into gparted to see if I could shrink my new XFS partition from 500gb to 250gb, and leave the other partition at 700gb with a 50gb SWAP partition. Right now it is 500/450/50.

But you cant %#$*^! shrink the damned partition after creating it. Even Paragon and Acronis cant do it. Any advice? Is there a way to chrink an XFS partition once it has been created?

Ah, shoot. No, it can't be shrunk, only grown using the command "xfs_growfs". That's one of the reasons why it's better suited for the enterprise server environment where partitions normally remain for the life of the server.

There's work being done on it, though.

http://xfs.org/index.php/Shrinking_Support

Here's a commentary on shrinking (or lack thereof):

http://lwn.net/Articles/476808/

 

[Overmind One]

Ah, shoot. No, it can't be shrunk, only grown using the command "xfs_growfs". That's one of the reasons why it's better suited for the enterprise server environment where partitions normally remain for the life of the server.

There's work being done on it, though.

http://xfs.org/index.php/Shrinking_Support

Here's a commentary on shrinking (or lack thereof):

http://lwn.net/Articles/476808/

Well, fortunately, I keep a spare 500gb external SATA for utility purposes. I will just have to copy the data to it and blow away the XFS partition and reformat it to EXT4. I really need the cross-compatibility for how I use the machines.

 

[Bluce Ree]

Well, fortunately, I keep a spare 500gb external SATA for utility purposes. I will just have to copy the data to it and blow away the XFS partition and reformat it to EXT4. I really need the cross-compatibility for how I use the machines.

For home use, EXT4 is more than adequate. XFS's advantages are more enterprise level, IMO. My database clusters are blazing fast on XFS compared to EXT4, in part due to its parallel write performance.

 

[Overmind One]

For home use, EXT4 is more than adequate. XFS's advantages are more enterprise level, IMO. My database clusters are blazing fast on XFS compared to EXT4, in part due to its parallel write performance.

At work, I will definitely be looking at that. I am managing applications clusters.

 

[Bluce Ree]

XFS was created by Silicon Graphics and was the default file system in SGI's Irix Unix-based OS. It's been around since 1993.

Here are some technical details:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/

 

[Overmind One]

XFS was created by Silicon Graphics and was the default file system in SGI's Irix Unix-based OS. It's been around since 1993.

Here are some technical details:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/

It is going to be excellent when mature. Also, I like the idea that it is not Microsoft's NTFS system or Apple's HFS. Things have gotten really bad out there in cyberspace. Large companies like Google and Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are trying to carve out sovereign cyber-nations out there which have borders defined by using systems owned or controlled by them. AOL tried this decades ago, and look where they are today? Microsoft has created it's own Kool Aid and drunk it down. It is only a matter of time before they start gasping. And now, the Millenials who are starting out with Linux are going to be able to contribute to Canonical and make it even better. Adobe products are going to be looked at very soon...they are too expensive, which means that people are going to want to replace it, and get out of Apple's walled garden.

 

[Bluce Ree]

It is going to be excellent when mature. Also, I like the idea that it is not Microsoft's NTFS system or Apple's HFS. Things have gotten really bad out there in cyberspace. Large companies like Google and Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are trying to carve out sovereign cyber-nations out there which have borders defined by using systems owned or controlled by them. AOL tried this decades ago, and look where they are today? Microsoft has created it's own Kool Aid and drunk it down. It is only a matter of time before they start gasping. And now, the Millenials who are starting out with Linux are going to be able to contribute to Canonical and make it even better. Adobe products are going to be looked at very soon...they are too expensive, which means that people are going to want to replace it, and get out of Apple's walled garden.

Keep in mind that XFS is about 21 years old, which makes it ancient in computer terms. Not sure how much more mature it can possibly be.

The only disadvantage it has is that it lacks the ability to shrink, which isn't typical in the enterprise environments.

I'm already impressed with LibreOffice and how it handles (reads and creates) MS Office file formats (xlsx, docx, etc). Gimp is an adequate Photoshop replacement, from what IU've seen so far, and Inkscape looks like a nice alternative to Adobe Illustrator. No popular proprietary software is immune to an open source alternative and the open source software has come a long way from its infancy, many of which are equal, if not superior, in quality to their commercial counterparts.

 

[Overmind One]

Keep in mind that XFS is about 21 years old, which makes it ancient in computer terms. Not sure how much more mature it can possibly be.

The only disadvantage it has is that it lacks the ability to shrink, which isn't typical in the enterprise environments.

I'm already impressed with LibreOffice and how it handles (reads and creates) MS Office file formats (xlsx, docx, etc). Gimp is an adequate Photoshop replacement, from what IU've seen so far, and Inkscape looks like a nice alternative to Adobe Illustrator. No popular proprietary software is immune to an open source alternative and the open source software has come a long way from its infancy, many of which are equal, if not superior, in quality to their commercial counterparts.

Get the Pinta Image Editor. Much easier to use and just as powerful as Gimp. Its in the software center. The other "disadvantage" of XFS is the inability to be read by Windows machines. This means that the current tools available to make Linux play well in an Active Directory Domain environment are useless. But hell, Im currently in an all-Linux enterprise environment for the first time, and it is very refreshing.

 

[Bluce Ree]

Get the Pinta Image Editor. Much easier to use and just as powerful as Gimp. Its in the software center. The other "disadvantage" of XFS is the inability to be read by Windows machines. This means that the current tools available to make Linux play well in an Active Directory Domain environment are useless. But hell, Im currently in an all-Linux enterprise environment for the first time, and it is very refreshing.

http://www.crossmeta.org/crossmeta.html

 

[Overmind One]

http://www.crossmeta.org/crossmeta.html

 

[Bluce Ree]

Notice how XP is still in there? MS really seems to have seriously underestimated just how good XP was.

 

[Overmind One]

Notice how XP is still in there? MS really seems to have seriously underestimated just how good XP was.

Yep, even after Windows 7 and all it's service packs, then Windows 8, then Windows 8.1, Windows XP remains the largest percentage of Microsoft users worldwide and in the United States and in the enterprise. And what did they do? They freaking ABANDONED it?!

 

[heisenberg]

You really can't trust anyone who reassures you with privacy will be kept safe. Emails/chats/video conferences are all compromised.They are bought and sold.The only way to get anonymity is to disconnect yourself from the internet completely, which is impossible.

 

[Overmind One]

You really can't trust anyone who reassures you with privacy will be kept safe. Emails/chats/video conferences are all compromised.They are bought and sold.The only way to get anonymity is to disconnect yourself from the internet completely, which is impossible.

Im more interested in privacy than anonymity. I dont mind people knowing that I own a few computers, or belong to websites and such, I am more interested in protecting myself against INTRUDERS who are secretly scanning my email messages, collecting information about who I communicate with, what is in my private file folders, identifying people and places in pictures I take, where I go in my car or on foot. In some cases, people's phones and computers are literally watching them or listening to them. All these things are what the NSA and CIA and FBI are doing in the name of National Security (so they say), facilitated by the Patriot Act.

The internet is just a computer network. Like the telephone network used to be, it was infrastructure used to communicate. Now, it is used to deliver entertainment, to communicate and deliver mail, to do banking and shopping etc. The internet is good. It's the spying and intrusion that is bad. In the case of Microsoft, Google and the other big players who have given access to the spies, it is a matter of principle. Would you befriend a person who comes into your home only to audit your belongings and rifle through your underwear drawer and checking account registers to see what you buy? I wouldnt, and I would also look at whomever hooked me up with that individual.

Microsoft and Apple and Google are in bed with the spies. They are collaborators. Linux is the only operating system which will likely never be closed. The NSA can control the infrastructure to a huge degree, but like I said...the internet is just a computer network. It is entirely possible to create closed networks between people using encryption tools, hard wires and other stuff.

 

[heisenberg]

Im more interested in privacy than anonymity. I dont mind people knowing that I own a few computers, or belong to websites and such, I am more interested in protecting myself against INTRUDERS who are secretly scanning my email messages, collecting information about who I communicate with, what is in my private file folders, identifying people and places in pictures I take, where I go in my car or on foot. In some cases, people's phones and computers are literally watching them or listening to them. All these things are what the NSA and CIA and FBI are doing in the name of National Security (so they say), facilitated by the Patriot Act.

The internet is just a computer network. Like the telephone network used to be, it was infrastructure used to communicate. Now, it is used to deliver entertainment, to communicate and deliver mail, to do banking and shopping etc. The internet is good. It's the spying and intrusion that is bad. In the case of Microsoft, Google and the other big players who have given access to the spies, it is a matter of principle. Would you befriend a person who comes into your home only to audit your belongings and rifle through your underwear drawer and checking account registers to see what you buy? I wouldnt, and I would also look at whomever hooked me up with that individual.

That's impossible to avoid. They don't care if they break the law or break someone's privacy, because they know they can get away with it. Even if companies respected privacy, the bullying tactics will sooner rather than later, will make the system compromised. That's how Microsoft/Google became compromised. They were bullied into doing it. Get used to the spying because it's staying.

Have a look at what they are doing here

http://www.computerworld.com.au/art..._also_creepy_just_data_retention_ludlam_says/