[ALUG] How do people here manage updates (or not)?

[Chris G]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 10:22:37AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
> Chris G wrote:
> > For me one of the major disadvantages of this approach is that when the
> > kernel gets updated (which is quite frequently) I have to recompile
> > both my Nvidia display drivers and Vmware.  
> 
> FOSS answer: Move to open source alternatives that don't have that 
> problem! Intel have released their drivers, ATI are heading that way. 
> And there are open-source alternatives to VMWare.
> 
> Pragmatic answer: Ubuntu has the Nvidia drivers in its repositories so 
> they're not an issue; they usually keep pace with the Kernel updates and 
> on the odd occassions where they haven't (I think I've only seen that 
> when playing with pre-release versions) their dependencies prevent the 
> kernel getting updated.
> 
Yes, Ubuntu does seem in many ways to offer much of what I want.


> VMWare had a similar solution in Ubuntu 7.04; the kernel modules were in 
> the repositories, and the server package itself was in Canonical's 
> "commercial" repo. This seems to have changed in 7.10 without 
> explanation (that I've found), so you're back to the same problem you're 
> already used to. In my case I decided to trial VirtualBox over the 
> weekend and found it works just as well (if not better) in many cases, 
> and is in the repositories. It is open source but includes closed source 
> components (its equivalent of VMWare Tools) with the latter free for 
> personal use but trialware for commercial use (I've not found the 
> pricing yet for commercial use, so far I'm only using it at home).
> 
> > Vmware is important to me as I need MS Access to run our company's
> > accounts.  
> 
> VirtualBox has a nice feature that allows the virtual machine's desktop 
> to be hidden, so that the applications on it (eg Access) appear more or 
> less as native applications on your desktop alongside other Linux apps.
> 

I was just looking around at alternatives to Vmware and saw
VirtualBox, does it basically 'feel' like Vmware in the way it works?
I.e. I can just install XP as a guest and run things in the guest
while the rest of my Linux box is just that, a Linux box?


> I've not tried Wine with Access but I assume you've already ruled that out?
> 
While Access is my major need there's enough other bits and pieces
(e.g. web sites that only work with IE, odd word documents that won't
open in OO) that a 'real' Windows XP is the easiest solution.


I think I'll go and take a serious look at Ubuntu again.

-- 
Chris Green