What distro do you use?

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 6:49 pm

KStorm wrote:Currently I use PCLinuxOS on one partition, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Edgy on the others. All at the same time, too.

This calls for a gear picture so we can see you running all three at the same time.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 6:57 pm

mowestusa wrote:
KStorm wrote:Currently I use PCLinuxOS on one partition, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Edgy on the others. All at the same time, too.
This calls for a gear picture so we can see you running all three at the same time.

Xen is already taking over the world!!

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 7:03 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:
mowestusa wrote:
KStorm wrote:Currently I use PCLinuxOS on one partition, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Edgy on the others. All at the same time, too.
This calls for a gear picture so we can see you running all three at the same time.
Xen is already taking over the world!!

Don't get me wrong, virtualization is cool, but what is the point of running multiple Linux distros on one machine? They all essentially do the same thing. The only reason I can see using virtualization technology is for running Windows or OS X inside of Linux for certain applications. Running 2 or 3 Linux distros at once seems redundant.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 7:52 pm

Wally Balljacker wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote:
mowestusa wrote: This calls for a gear picture so we can see you running all three at the same time.
Xen is already taking over the world!!
Don't get me wrong, virtualization is cool, but what is the point of running multiple Linux distros on one machine? They all essentially do the same thing. The only reason I can see using virtualization technology is for running Windows or OS X inside of Linux for certain applications. Running 2 or 3 Linux distros at once seems redundant.

Xen is mostly designed for servers, as it's not like a VMware Workstation, but more like VMware Server.
For servers, there's a huge advantage of Xen or other virtualization technologies. First of all, you can consolidate many servers onto one giant box. For example, instead of having multiple dual physical servers, you could have one big giant physical server and run many virtual servers off of it.

On the desktop, especially on Windows, virtualization is good for security, as you can run an OS in an isolated environment, and not risk things getting into it infecting your host environment.

For me personally, I just think it'd be cool to run muiltiple distros at once. Because, I like both say Fedora Core and SUSE, although I prefer SUSE for my daily usage, every now and then I'd like to use Fedora for whatever reason. With virtualization I could do that. Or I could run *BSD and Linux at the same time.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 8:10 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote: Xen is mostly designed for servers, as it's not like a VMware Workstation, but more like VMware Server.
For servers, there's a huge advantage of Xen or other virtualization technologies. First of all, you can consolidate many servers onto one giant box. For example, instead of having multiple dual physical servers, you could have one big giant physical server and run many virtual servers off of it.

I guess, I get the idea behind Virtual Servers on one big machine, but I wonder why all of this Virtual Stuff is not going in the direction of jails under FreeBSD. That seems to be the coolest idea for servers. You can run isolated instances of different server services and web apps with unique ip addresses with out the bigger hit of multiple kernels and other redundant services and apps.

Does Linux even have anything like jails? (It seems unique to FreeBSD from what I have heard, NetBSD and OpenBSD have something similar, but not the same from what I understand.)

Why hasn't this caught on more than allocating 128mb of ram and CPU power to each Virtual Machine like QEMU, VMware, and Xen? (Just seems like with jails you could run secure webservices and server applications with a much lower spec machine than if you set up Xen on the same lower end hardware.)

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 8:23 pm

mowestusa wrote:I guess, I get the idea behind Virtual Servers on one big machine, but I wonder why all of this Virtual Stuff is not going in the direction of jails under FreeBSD. That seems to be the coolest idea for servers. You can run isolated instances of different server services and web apps with unique ip addresses with out the bigger hit of multiple kernels and other redundant services and apps.

I guess it depends on what you need out of your OS, if you look to share your box with other people or wanna lock it down, jails seem very nice. However if you're looking to consolidate a lot of servers, I think full on virtualization makes more sense. Because you're looking to not waste CPU power, if you have spare cycles, you're not using the full power that you have.

mowestusa wrote:Does Linux even have anything like jails? (It seems unique to FreeBSD from what I have heard, NetBSD and OpenBSD have something similar, but not the same from what I understand.)

The "jail" feature is unique to FreeBSD, it's basically a kernel level virtual machine. There is something for NetBSD and OpenBSD called Sysjail, however the website seems to have disappeared, no idea why, and it does something different with the use of systrace.
I am not aware of any sort of jail stuff for Linux, however it's a quite compelling feature of FreeBSD. You could do a "chroot jail" under Linux, but an attacker can brake out of that, and that is not virtualization.

mowestusa wrote:Why hasn't this caught on more than allocating 128mb of ram and CPU power to each Virtual Machine like QEMU, VMware, and Xen? (Just seems like with jails you could run secure webservices and server applications with a much lower spec machine than if you set up Xen on the same lower end hardware.)

Well, if you wanna consolidate multiple servers onto one machine, it seems to make more sense making a full on isolation with kernel and everything, because for this you are looking to scale a lot of stuff, not just security.

sulfide · Post by **sulfide** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 9:03 pm

i use it for kernel programming, it's pretty nice for this.

KStorm · Post by **KStorm** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 10:02 pm

mowestusa wrote:
KStorm wrote:Currently I use PCLinuxOS on one partition, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Edgy on the others. All at the same time, too.
This calls for a gear picture so we can see you running all three at the same time.

Just kidding, guys. The only way I come close to running all three at the same time is to reboot into each one of them, because they are all, and Linux is, awesome!

jamathis · Post by **jamathis** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 9:59 pm

I use Ubuntu as my primary distro on my laptop and desktop. I have a spare box with Xubuntu on it right now. But I'm thinking of checking out something different on it like Vector, Frugalware, or maybe even Slackware.

sulfide · Post by **sulfide** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 10:13 pm

mowestusa wrote: I guess, I get the idea behind Virtual Servers on one big machine, but I wonder why all of this Virtual Stuff is not going in the direction of jails under FreeBSD. That seems to be the coolest idea for servers. You can run isolated instances of different server services and web apps with unique ip addresses with out the bigger hit of multiple kernels and other redundant services and apps.

Jail lacks the resource isolation of Xen.

mowestusa wrote: Does Linux even have anything like jails? (It seems unique to FreeBSD from what I have heard, NetBSD and OpenBSD have something similar, but not the same from what I understand.)

hmmm LSM's and selinux!

mowestusa wrote: Why hasn't this caught on more than allocating 128mb of ram and CPU power to each Virtual Machine like QEMU, VMware, and Xen? (Just seems like with jails you could run secure webservices and server applications with a much lower spec machine than if you set up Xen on the same lower end hardware.)

in a jail client A can DoS client B's resources and vice versa. If these are just apps for a single client, then use selinux.

PJ · Post by PJ » Tue Nov 28, 2006 9:04 pm

I am using Arch Linux.

A bit OT, but since I am a new user here I could mention that the main reason that made me start listen to TLLTS was because of this topic which BTW was on the Arch Linux forum. I didn't know about the show before.
Great show! I have listen to it since then.

gordonmarkus · Post by **gordonmarkus** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 4:37 pm

I run centos4.4 on my webserver, and it's great!

I tried slackware last year (10.2) and it was really fast - but there was quite a lot of effort involved!

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 5:29 pm

PJ wrote:I am using Arch Linux.

A bit OT, but since I am a new user here I could mention that the main reason that made me start listen to TLLTS was because of this topic which BTW was on the Arch Linux forum. I didn't know about the show before.
Great show! I have listen to it since then.

Finally a thread where nobody whines and moans about the audio quality. The Arch Forum earns major points on this one. May have to move Arch up on my "distros to try." SLED got a nice kick to the back of that line.

jsusanka · Post by **jsusanka** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 7:59 pm

Tangerine Imac G3 266mhz - ubuntu LTS 6.06 - dapper
Pentium p233mx - IPCOP Firewall 4.x
Linksys WRT54G - HyperWRT 2.1b1
Pentium 4 1.6mhz - ubuntu 6.10 Edgy
Amd64 1.6mhz - ubuntu 6.10 edgy
sunblade 100 sun desktop - ubuntu LTS 6.06 - dapper
laptop - ubuntu 6.10 edgy

been trying the latest beryl releases and man they are cool - the cube is transparent - looks really nice and also has the burn effect on open and close.

PJ · Post by PJ » Thu Nov 30, 2006 5:39 am

Vogateer wrote:Finally a thread where nobody whines and moans about the audio quality. The Arch Forum earns major points on this one. May have to move Arch up on my "distros to try." SLED got a nice kick to the back of that line.

Wow, I didn't actually think anyone would read the complete thread, it was more ar less some kind of reference for where I first heard about TLLTS.

thelinuxlink.net

What distro do you use?

What is your primary/favorite distro?