commit --amend

I'm on the hunt for a good virtualization setup. Really, I just want my primary machine to be able to run at least 3 VM's at once. This is for exploratory purposes. I can use the lab to learn about:

• Load balancing
• Samba as Primary Domain Controller
• Proxy servers
• General try-before-I-buy software evaluation, keeping primary machine clean

Has anyone else out there explored this? What works for you?

Requirements:

• Low memory footprint (256-512 MB) - I want at least three VM's running on a 2GB box.
• Low disk footprint (IGB image)
• Working setup without too much configuration (network comes up, drivers found, etc)
• X is optional - I'm fine with CLI and would prefer the low overhead.

QEMU is the platform of choice, even though I can't get kqemu working. It appears that Intel's virtualization features (I don't have this) is required for kqemu, although QEMU's documentation doesn't sqy this specifically.

As much as I like Gentoo, compiling everything under a very CPU-bound QEMU sounds painful. Also, lots of disk space is required, although I could mitigate this by having all VM's mount a shared /usr.

Running standard desktop distros is painful - Ubuntu's live CD is barely usable after it boots in this environment. Puppy and Damn Small perform reasonably, although one (I forget which) doesn't find the network.

If you have a good working setup for this kind of thing, please shoot me an e-mail (comments not working right now).

I watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time this weekend. What a treat! It's scary by today's standards. It was also well-crafted, with good use of music and a good pace throughout. Some little mysteries were left to the viewer's intellect to solve. Also, Tobe Hooper (who also directed Poltergeist) seemed to understand that what's scary isn't what Leatherface is going to do to me, it's seeing what Leatherface did to the last 50 victims. This is rightfully a classic.

If I recall, UT's Harry Ransom Center has Gunnar Hansen's leather face on display.

I get to share the history, too. The filming location is within a mile of my house, near Round Rock's La Frontera shopping center. Thanks for the heads up, Google Earth!

From the Google Earth/Wikimapia tag for the location:

Quick Hill in Round Rock, Texas, was the location for much of the filming of the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" film. The house used in the film was moved to Kingsland, Texas, where it now sits as a restaurant addition to the historic Antlers Hotel. The restaurant is called The Old Town Grill.

I've been a Gentoo user for two years now, and I can't see using another distro anytime soon. There are four reasons for this.

Fine-grained feature control

When a package is compiled from source, a number of flags can be specified to the configure script which enable/disable specific features. Usually the feature adds a dependency on another library, which is why it was optional in the first place.

For example, I know for a fact that I won't listen to Ogg Vorbis audio files (sorry GNU guys), and so I can build my music player without Vorbis support, and skip building libvorbis.

With binary distributions, you get whatever feature set is decided for you. It will always be wrong. For certain packages you want every conceivable feature, for others the basic feature set is fine - only I know when I want robust vs. lean.

Complete updates

A key feature of Gentoo is that everything, not just userland packages, is built from source, and updateable. I regularly pull updates for packages all through the stack, from Firefox all the way down to libc.

The result of this is that major Gentoo releases are completely unimportant to me. I can update the system completely, and not be missing anything that a new Gentoo iso install would provide.

Notice how excited people get about new Ubuntu releases (Jaundiced Jaguar! Kinky Koala!) Yeah, we don't have that.

System stability

This one's simple - there's less hangy-crashy stuff with Gentoo than I had with SuSe. I credit this to everything being properly compiled and linked, so library discrepancies are more easily detected at compile time.

In fact, the only hangy-crashy experiences I have are with two proprietary binary installs - Flash and Citrix.

Cleaner packaging

My virtual hosting provider (VPSLink FTW!) publishes this table comparing package sizes of the distros they support. When I first saw that Gentoo had 9k packages (says more now) vs., say, Debian's 26k packages, I felt ripped off. Am I only getting half the packages? Just half of Linux?

Then I remembered how the binary distros separate, for example, gimp, gimp-devel, and gimp-docs into three packages.

Gentoo uses a single tarball for the whole package. The header files are always installed, which as a developer I appreciate. The docs install is usually a use flag that I can enable if I choose. If I don't install the docs, then decide later that I want them, I tweak the use flag, and re-emerge from the tarball I've already downloaded.

Conclusion

Stability, cleanliness, updates, and granular control: these advantages outweigh Gentoo's perceived warts - the steep learning curve, the low-fi CLI package tool, and the long compile times.

So, for the record, I'd rather be compiling.