Saynonara mr Desktop
Dec 10Sometimes being a geek means taking risks, trying things out and experimenting with new gadgets, technologies and trends that arrive on the shores between real and Cyberspace. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been noticing such a “looming trend” in my techno-ecosphere and decided to bite the bullet and go head on into it ..
But first let me explain : I live a very mobile lifestyle. Times where I am actually “in my home office” are quite sparse. I’m on the road a lot, I work abroad and the scarse moments that I AM home, I love to hang out with my beloved better half, our two dogs and our cat. Holing myself up in my office upstairs with the door shut .. is not an activity I favor so much. The result has been that my favorite “batcave” has been largely “unused” lately. The Dual screen I7 Mac Mini setup that I had setup was sparsely used (mostly as a server) and the i5 Linux desktop that sat along side it spent most of its time idling away or catching up on software and security update. Meanwhile I was either working from my Galaxy Nexus phone, reading stuff on my Nexus Tablet or iPad or punching away on the 11.6 inch Macbook Air that I drag around virtually anywhere.
But when we look at the trends of technology, we are slowly seeing the processor powers of all of these different devices coming up to par with one another. My “Desktop machines” might sport a little more ram then my Laptops but overall, my laptop(s) have the power to haul what needs to be hauled. My phone / tablet enable me to communicate and consume content anywhere .. so the question came up : Why do I still NEED a desktop anyway ? To sit there ?
I bit the bullet 2 weeks ago when I disassembled my Mac Mini setup, and hooked the machine, together with a bunch of USB drives, up to our TV downstairs. The “Super Desktop” I had put together a couple of months ago, is no more. I have changed its roll from “production system” to “central home server”. Hooking it up to our tv and stereo system it serves up movies , tv shows and music when we want to, and uses its raw I7 power (and 16 gig of ram) to run multiple virtual machines. The machine is now almost constantly doing “Something” and gives me the power of a mediacenter and a small datacenter at my fingertips. Because all of the content is stored and backed up in a central location, I no longer need to worry about ‘what file is where’ since everything is stored right there on the server. With that I also alleviate one of the major hassles I had where some files would reside on desktop X and some files would reside on desktop Y … no more local files, period. The i5 Linux desktop went out next. Whatever local data and settings still resided where either transferred to the downstairs sever or copies over to my Macbook air that is also running Linux.
So what am I left with.
So right now my ‘laptops’ have found their rightful place in my office. I’ve devided up the 24 inch Displays between my 13 inch Macbook pro running Mountain Lion and my 11.6 inch Macbook Air running Ubuntu Linux. I’ve given an nice “laptop stand ” to both and a comfortable keyboard. When I do ‘Arrive’ in the office, the laptop of choice can “land and charge” in its designated slot and the comfortable keyboard, mouse and screen give me the perfect “workstation”. (With an extra screen)
Simplicity, portability, elegance,
In the end, Its not about the speed. If you would honestly ask me if I “miss” my desktops ? No. The impact on speed and disk space in negligible and the fact that I can now “carry around” my workstation everywhere offers me much more perks than downsides. By centralizing my storage and cpu load to the downstairs servers, I now have (with the additional use of Cloud solutions like Dropbox and Ubuntu one) everything I need on every system that I need. The last divide between home and mobile has hereby completely vanished.
What I have lost ? Nothing much actually. Since i’m not an avid gamer, my desktop(s) where no graphical powerhouses. When I do feel like Fragging something I either pop over to my game console or fire up Call of Duty on my Macbook pro (or any good game on Ubuntu, the ‘Air’ is able to hold its own there too) When on the road I connect to my home shared using VPN tunnels and SSHFS mounts. Most of the file syncronisation is handled by Dropbox, Ubuntu one and my Google Apps environment. Time to say “Sayonara” to the age of the desktop. The beige boxes, pimped powerhouses or multi-core mega-machines. They have lived long and prosper .. but its time to move on.
So what about YOU ? Do you still have any desktops running ? Thinking of biting the bullet and dumping the “beige boxes” ? Tell us about it in the comments section.
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Turn your home into a virtual datacenter with Virtualbox.
Nov 24
You’ve heard us talk lots of times about Virtualbox. Our FAVORITE free (as in ‘Gratis’) cross platform virtualisation software. As we mentioned in the previous podcast episode about “Proxmox” (a more serious virtualisation tool) the machines in our home with their I5 and i7 processors and “Gigglebytes” of ram .. are mostly idling around in a corner when you’re not playing Call of Duty (and perhaps you even do THAT on the Xbox) So lets give those machines something to DO ! Running a ‘dedicated’ solution like dropbox might just be a little too much, but perhaps you have some cycles to spare on another system that is also being used as a desktop ? Why not try Virtualbox.
As an example : Currently I have dragged my I7, 16 gigabyte’s of ram Mac Mini downstairs and hooked it up to our tv. Since it carries most of our media it was a little silly to have it running in my upstairs office and having to stream everything back to the TV using a second (front end) box. So now the little bugger sits in our media cabinet with some 4 terrabyte of USB Harddisks hooked up to it. Having it just sit there running OSX and acting as a mediaserver or fileserver was a waste of power and cpu cycles. So with virtualbox I gave it something to do. I installed Virtualbox, hooked up a big external usb drive and started cooking some VM’s.
- Ubuntu 12.10 vm with LXDE : This is my ‘internal’ ubuntu desktop. I use it for running cronjobs, copy operations and scripts that are meant for internal use only. Its my ‘Secure box’. I’ve enabled the RDP server on it (a builtin function of Virtualbox) so I can cantrol the screen of the virtual machine from afar.
- Ubuntu 12.10 vm with LXDE : The second machine has a torrent client running as does the ‘dirty deeds’ that need to be done on the internet. Insecure surfing, downloading and remote access via SSH are its main goals. Once a week I ‘roll back’ the machine to its original (clean) post install state with the “snapshot” function of Virtualbox.
- Ubuntu 12.10 Server : The main task of this machine is running OWNCLOUD (also featured in one of our podcasts) as my personal cloud storage.
- Nas4Free : With a 1800 gigabyte virtual disk, this VIRTUAL machine acts as my main file storage system. So instead of putting my files on a disk and sharing them out via the file-sharing options on my (host) OSX system, I made a virtual machine of a linux application geared towards storage and filesharing … and put all of my files INSIDE a virtual machine. Performance is very good so far and the added perks to running Nas4free are going to be a topic for next weeks podcast.
In the end, controlling these virtual machines is a little messy sometimes. I mean you can’t just interrupt @Niejana when she is watching “Blood and Chrome” to say : Sorry about that, I need to mess with something on my Virtualbox and for that I need to use the TV ? You need ‘remote’ ways to manage that virtual machine situation.
- Controlling the Virtual Machines. Remote controlling the virtual machines is easy. You can use the built in RDP server in Virtualbox to use an RDP client (on any operating system) to open up the remote machine. If you also want to access them from the outside, try installing Teamviewer on the Virtual Machine. If you are using a Linux operating system as your virtual machine you can enable the SSH Server and go in via the terminal.
- Controlling Virtualbox. Unbeknown to many, virtualbox has a powerful set of terminal commands you can use. With a simple terminal window to my Mac (SSH) I can use the ‘VboxManage’ commands to do just about anything. Make a new virtual machine, clone a drive, resize a drive. Everything runs in the background and its a very very powerful tool. You can find the entire list of Virtualbox commands HERE.
- Controlling Virtualbox with a web interface. Virtualbox also has a web interface that helps you control your virtualmachines. In a point and click way you can start and stop VM’s and do anything you can do on the ‘regular’ desktop window. Installing it might be a little chore (depending on the host operating system you use) but the results are pretty spiffy. Find the howto HERE.
And with those little tips you know can turn that headless box OR that powerful machine upstairs that is always on, but sometimes used by your kids for gaming… into your own personal datacenter. Don’t have the spare beige box for Proxmox ? Just have a desktop and want to get it to do some cool things ‘under the hood’. Want your own invisible datacenter ? Here you go ! Download Virtualbox NOW.
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Automate your Ubuntu updates with a simple command.
Nov 17
One of the very annoying things about having multiple Linux systems (or virtual machines) in the house is that you constantly need to keep them patched and updated. Sure, they are not as vulnerable as some Windows systems but it is still good practice to keep your systems nicely patched. So instead of doing sudo apt-get upgrade every time (or worse , getting a popup from the update manager while you are just in the middle of watching your favorite Youtube video about bunnies ) .. lets schedule this.
Scheduling things is not bad , but you have to be careful just WHAT you want those systems to do. You don’t want to wake up one morning and see that your LTS (long term support) workstation has just done a make-over and rolled onto the cutting edge version of the new release of your operating system. So kernel and distro upgrades should not be a part of your schedule.
The command we choose to use is Aptitude. With the following string you can do an update and upgrade on the same line.
/usr/bin/aptitude -y update && /usr/bin/aptitude -y safe-upgrade
So what does it do ?
“-y” makes sure that you don’t have to type YES at the end of the command.
” safe-upgrade” means that kernell or distro upgrades are a “nono”
“&&” links the commands together.
How to schedule it.
Simple. Log in as a user with root access and type “crontab -e”
next ad the following line to your cron
0 1 * * * /usr/bin/aptitude -y update && /usr/bin/aptitude -y safe-upgrade
Thats it. Now the the upgrade is executed every single night at 1 am.
source. Kevin van Zonnevelds blog.
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Inside every phone is a pc trying to get out.
Nov 16When I take a look at what I cram into my bag every morning, I try not the think of the redundancy that huddles inside. Should my Tablet, Phone and Laptop ever play together using a magical protocol made of fairy farts, I would be able to have a small load balanced computer cluster with a shoulder strap. Each device houses at least both the storage capacity and the cpu power of a 5 year old desktop computer. In essence : I have at least 4 different “computers” in my bag. Never mind the fact we give them different names and use them for different things, in the end they all have the muscle power under the hood .. to do the same thing.
So why should your phone be just your phone ? Why not make it so much more ? “Ubuntu for Android” looks down that path of possibilities. In essence they want to put a desktop operating system inside your mobile device and have it “morph” into whatever you need , depending if the device is “docked” or not.
The whole thing is just an “idea” right now, but Canonical is putting some serious thought and effort into it. As recent builds of “Ubuntu for the Nexus 7” are downloadable for anyone who wants to give it a try , can only indicate .. the term “My Phone, My Tablet and My Computer ” might soon find themselves in the history books.
Thanx to @Sharky for the heads-up !
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Zorin : The gateway to Linux for Windows users.
Nov 14With the coming of Windows 8, changes will be inevitable for our fellow computer users who embrace the ways of Redmont. Where we have been used to hitting the Start button for years and have been closing the windows to our virtual world with the little cross, everything is about to change. Sure, the big square tiles on our desktop might be a blessing for those who are shortsighted or have the eye-hand coördination of a drunken elephant… but what about those who would like to keep things the same ?
I’m talking about the grandma’s, the uncle’s aunties and cousins for whome this kind of change would mean hours on the phone with the family geek to get things figured out.. I’m talking about your very sanity. Would it not be great to give these people a chance to continue on an OS that LOOKS like the one they used before, but has the benefits of being safe, secure and open source ?
Enter Zorin Linux. Its tagline “The gateway to Linux for Windows users” does tend to promise a solution to the very problem we face with our bloodlines standing on the precipice of the Metro interface. Zorin is a good looking, crisp and mature version of Linux with a slick but simple look and feel that, with some minor tweaks, could convice a novice user that he IS still in fact still using Windows 7 . Steering away from the Unity interface, this Debian based OS has the additional value that it has a “look changer”. This lets Zorin Linux act like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. As if asked the question “What is your name” Zorin can reply with “What do you want it to be”. This is because this pretty little functionality lets Zorin “Morph” from a Windows 7 , Xp, or even OSX “look-a-like” in a matter of seconds.
Zorin might be called “a shallow broad” because of its focus on looks, but underneath the ever changing shell lies a well polished Debian core with thoughtfully selected applications and a stable end result. For new Linux users who love the “old ways of XP” Zorin is a perfect alternative to Windows 8 and a great way to herd those stray friends and family members onto the planes of the penguins.
Zorin is available in free and premium editions over at Zorin-OS.com.
