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Running all desktops on VMWare

Posted November 22nd, 2007 in Linux/Unix/BSD and VMWare

I have become increasingly dissatisfied with openSUSE, particularly since upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3 with a large number of breakages and general instability after the upgrade. I guess if I'd done a clean install then I wouldn't be suffering from some of the instabilities, but it's not something I really considered doing (especially given I accidentally upgraded in the first place).

Yesterday I had had enough of Kontact/KMail crashing on me simply because I wanted to delete a message on an IMAP folder, and general slowness in general, so I decided to see if there were any upgrades for KDE, KMail or Kontact. There were, so I installed these, and then rebooted to ensure all the new libraries etc were used.

When I logged back in again, the IMAP service was completely broken. I couldn't log into my IMAP account, getting some error message about the IMAP service not being available. I was also getting errors from PHP (I run PHP scripts and also PHP on an Apache server for development purposes) complaining about IMAP issues. All the kicker applets were broken as well.

Hmm no email. Not having the kicker applets is bad enough; I can deal without them, but email is an extremely important tool. I was able to log into my IMAP server using Outlook in a Windows XP VMWare virtual machine, so at least I could keep getting email, but I prefer to use KMail and KDE. I really couldn't be bothered working out how to fix this and, as mentioned above, openSUSE has been annoying me a lot. I'm sure I'll detail this in future posts. (The next post shows how to install YUM in SUSE instead of the extremely slow package management tool in Yast).

The main issue with reinstalling completely is that there may be some downtime while I get things ready and working again, as well as some unexpected issues which inevitably seem to crop up. I've been running Windows XP in a VMWare virtual machine for some time now, so a few days ago I thought maybe I should run my Linux desktop in a virtual machine as well. That way I can get the new install set up all nicely, but still have access to everything as it is currently set up.

While I'm at it, I can move my web development stuff (Apache/PHP/MySQL) into a virtual machine which is set up exactly the same as the servers I publish my sites on (CentOS 5 with PHP 5.1.6 and MySQL 5.0). That way I know if it works on the VM it'll work on the production server. I have had some issues with this recently where some Asian character encoding / UTF8 issues were fine on my development box, but not on the production server even though they appeared to be set up more or less the same, With a VM that is actually identical to the production server I can be assured of the same issues appearing on both, and the fix for both being the same.

Anyway... yesterday I set up a VM with Kubuntu 7.10 and migrated my email and all the other desktop stuff to it. It only took about an hour to install and copy all the stuff over. (I did have some issues with my stupid Canon laser printer which wasted more time, but I really didn't need to bother in the end).

So I'm currently still running the host and LAMP stuff on the openSUSE host operating system, and am using Kubuntu and Windows XP in the guest operating systems. Everything is running much more smoothly and I'm not having any stability issues with some of the apps that were broken or not working properly in SUSE. Much happier :)

When I get some time, I'll set up the CentOS LAMP virtual machine. I can then move the web stuff onto that, and reinstall the host operating system with something really low on system resources; at this stage I'm thinking Xubuntu. It needs to run as a GUI and do a few tasks, such as being the file server for the guests with SAMBA and NFS shares, back the files up to my online server on a daily basis, and a few other bits and bobs. I'll do another post about this when it's all done.

And of course this means there's going to be a few posts over the next few days about doing stuff with Kubuntu :)