A Portable VMWare Desktop with Ubuntu
Posted on February 15th, 2006
Lately I've been using the Ubuntu Virtual Machine provided by VMWare in another attempt at getting together a portable, virtual desktop. Previously I used a NetBSD virtual machine with just the essentials: a lightweight window manager, a web browser, a terminal, and Emacs. It was great in theory, but the minimalism started to get on my nerves after a while. I realized I was spending too much time fussing with keeping pkgsrc updated, and trying to figure out why things were never quite the way I really wanted to be.
Once you get past the mindset that Linux and Unix distributions are things you must install from the ground up by yourself, and start taking advantage of the ready-to-go images offered in VMWare's Virtual Machine Center, things gets a whole lot easier. I jumped right into using and customizing Ubuntu, which really impressed me with how much polish it had. Everything just worked. As I'm sure many people have already realized, Ubuntu seems to be the créme de la créme of Linux desktops.
Naturally, there's a price to be paid. When I try to use the Ubuntu image on my computer at work, things slow down quite a bit. It doesn't have enough stamina to run Windows and a full Linux desktop. Switching between the VMWare Player window and other application windows on the host side is like a throwback to a computer you might have used four or five years ago-- it works, but only eventually.
I think this is mostly likely due to a shortage of RAM. I need to work with what I've got, so Ubuntu is probably not going to work out for this project (although I'd otherwise use it in a heartbeat). Over at vmwarez.com, I came across someone talking about a Virtual Machine expressly designed for Live CDs such as Knoppix. That's a great idea. It solves the biggest problem with using a Live CD for day-to-day work, which is that you can't switch back to your primary OS without restarting. You're either in one place or the other. With a tiny tiny VMWare image, though, you get the luxury of bouncing around and a feature-rich desktop tightly packed into the contents of a CD.
As is pointed out on vmwarez.com, the challenge with a Live CD is being able to save your files and settings between restarts. But I think that's possible. The Wikipedia entry on Knoppix mentions there's a DVD image available as well. Even better!