Can VMWare and Knoppix Provide OS Mobility?
Posted on February 25th, 2006
Recapping some of my previous posts, I want to see if it's feasible to move from the traditional arrangement of having a work computer and a home computer (never the twain shall meet) and instead have a portable environment which I can easily move from machine to machine. I want to do this with the stuff I've already got, so buying a laptop and pack-muling it around is not an option. Similarly, I don't want to buy an external USB hard drive unless it's going to unquestionably be a deal breaker for the project.
Knoppix is a Linux distribution on a CD. You boot from the CD and after a little shake rattle and roll you've got yourself a full-fancy Linux desktop. Take the CD out and your computer starts up normally.
Knoppix won't normally be able to save your settings, since you run it from a CD (or DVD) and all. Every startup is like a brand new day. But there are ways around this-- you can set things up so that your settings get written to other media such as a floppy or USB drive.
Normally you burn Knoppix to a CD and boot your computer with it. The two main disadvantages here are that running everything off a CD will be slower than you want, and a loss of access to the computer's regular desktop environment. If you boot a Windows computer into Knoppix, running your Windows applications will either be impossible or impractical.
VMWare Player offers an alternative: set up a virtual machine that will use the ISO file directly. That takes care of the CDROM speed and noise problems. The windows environment will still be available, so that's taken care of as well. And instead of using a USB drive to save settings, let's make things even simpler and use an additional VMWare disk image instead.
Not going the USB route has two advantages. When starting the virtual machine, I noticed that VMWare player did a bit of tug-of-war with Windows over who had ownership of the device. This can be annoying. It's not an issue when you're using Knoppix the normal way because you're only dealing with one operating system. But when you've got one living inside the other, it's possible that you'd start up Knoppix, not get your settings picked up, and then have to rejigger and restart.
The other advantage is disk size. Any disk image placed on a USB drive will have a fixed size, and must be small enough to fit on the drive in the first place. You'll be in a pickle if you run out of space inside that image. VMWare's disk images on the other hand can start off small and grow as needed.
You could also install Knoppix to a VMWare disk image, and skip the ISO altogether. But in doing so you'd lose the ISO's fixed size and its ability to cram so much software together. You might as well not bother with Knoppix in the first place.
Booting the Knoppix ISO through VMWare and saving settings and data to a secondary VMWare disk gets you all the way to full mobility. You carry around a CD with the ISO (that is, burning the file to a CD rather than its contents) and maybe an installer for VMWare player. When you sit down in front of a new computer, you install the Player then copy the rest of the CD's contents to somewhere on the hard drive. Start up the Virtual Machine, let it boot from the ISO and pick up settings from your supplemental VMWare disk image, and you've got full separation between the parts of your computing environment that are specific to you and the parts that are not.