Finally! The holiday is here, and we’re pretty much packed and ready to go. As I’ve mentioned countless times during my last posts, I’ve an upcoming RHCT-exam after easter, and though I was planning on spending my days off work studying, I never really planned to bring a laptop to the cabin. We’re heading to a place where there’s no tv or radio, just the cabin and nature. Should give me the peace of mind I need to focus properly on my studies. Anyway, the RHCT-exam is all about hands-on experience, and I wasn’t going to get that without actually tampering with a RedHat installation (or CentOS in this case). Trying to install both VirtualBox and Paralell on my Powerbook G4 was plain impossible, as both only support Macs with an Intel processor, not PPC. And QEMU, sheesh – I’m sure I would’ve grown a long gray beard before the system even managed to boot up properly. I had to discard the idea of bringing my PowerBook, being that it was such crap. That experience (and some other ones) have made me dislike Mac greatly, so now I’m just hoping that my workplace will provide me with a laptop, which I can use both privately and for work-purposes. Needless to say I’ll be installing VirtualBox there as well. ;) If you don’t know what VirtualBox is, read on.
My co-worker has been a great influence on me lately. I used to despise the eyecandy that Fedora and Gnome provided, and now I’m using Fedora 8 at home, with Gnome, thanks to him. A week back or so we came upon the subject of virtualization, and he spoke about some open source software called VirtualBox, that supposedly did the same (if not more) as the famous VMWare. I’ve now been using VirtualBox for almost a week, and let me tell you, it’s just insane how good it is. I can highly recommend it if you would like to give other operating systems a try without having to repartition your hard drive, or even format it. Every OS that you install through VirtualBox is stored in its own unique file, thus enabling you to make the changes necessary on your local machine, and just bring the file with you to another location (provided that there is a VirtualBox installation on the remote machine), and fire it up there. Here’s a nifty little screenshot of VirtualBox running in Fedora 8, with CentOS installed. Nice huh!
I’m off to get the final things done for the trip, happy easter to whomever is reading this. ;)
