In a small but great piece of news for cooperation between the world's largest software comany and the Linux community, Microsoft has submitted drivers for the Linux kernel that will help Linux virtual machines running on top of a Windows Hyper-V host to run more efficiently.

Kudos to Microsoft for the move.

I use a Windows XP virtual machine on my Ubuntu desktop whenever I need to access Windows software like Internet Explorer. I have found it to be a very useful tool in my toolkit, and overall I have been very happy with the functionality (which is, by the way, essentially the same thing as Windows 7 will offer with XP Mode).

Lately, however, I have noticed a lot of visual artifacts in my XP virtual machine. I can't recall seeing the problem under Ubuntu 8.10, but it might have been carried over, I don't know. At any rate, the most annoying thing about the problem is not just the visual artifacts (which is quite annoying), but the fact that the visual artifacts seem to have some substantial form, because mouse functionality (like clicking a link) doesn't work when one of the visual artifacts is in the way. 

Take a look at this section of a Google search result web page to see the problem:

This one bug is probably my current pet peeve with Ubuntu 9.04, which overall is an excellent OS. Hopefully the bug will be resolved soon.To be fair, the problem may not be with the virtualization system at all. It could be a problem with the Virtual Machine Manager, it could be a display driver problem with my nVidia display card, or something completely unrelated. Still, it worked just fine until recently, so I expect that the Ubuntu team will figure it out before too long.

IT news sheet The Inquirer has written a piece on why they think Windows 7 XP mode will stink.  As someone who has been using virtualization on Ubuntu for some time now (including a virtualized XP install on my desktop for specific tasks), I take for granted some of their criticisms as limitations of virtualization technology. No 3D acceleration, for instance, and no accelerated sound support. While that makes XP mode less than ideal for gaming, It should be fine for running productivity software and other older desktop applications that  do not work on Vista.

My preference is to use Ubuntu and get off the OS licensing train completely, but of course that isn't possible in all cases. Some folks love that other commercial desktop OS, too, which I guess is fine. 

Very cool developments coming from Microsoft. Winsupersite reports that Windows 7 will feature an XP mode using virtualization technology. This is great news for people who have been less than thrilled with Vista's limited compatibility with native XP applications.  Nothing like a little competition to spur innovation. Kudos to the team at Microsoft for taking the time to plug in the technology.

As you may have seen in previous posts, I have become a fan of Ubuntu on the desktop. Nevertheless, the world is still dominated by desktop and laptop computers running some flavor of Windows. Everyone agrees that Microsoft made serious missteps with Vista, but the early commentary on Windows 7 has been far more positive. I thought I would take a look at the Windows 7 beta and see for myself.

Rather than wipe out or upgrade an existing system, I decided to install the Win7 beta as a virtual machine on my Ubuntu 8.10 desktop. The system runs on an Athlon X2 5600+ with 4GB RAM (3 GB accessible using 32-bit Ubuntu), RAID 1 system disks, and a separate volume for storage, including virtual machine images.

I downloaded the 2.8 GB installer and used Ubuntu's Virtual Machine Manager to create the new VM. Initially, VMM allocated 4 GB to the VM file. I decided to up that to 20 GB to give myself some room to install test applications, and I am very glad that I did. The initial install process went very smoothly, but the resulting system (Windows Ultimate, according to the installer) took up 6.5 GB on disk. That seems like a huge footprint for an OS alone, considering that there are very few applications installed by default.

To give the OS a real test, I configured the VM to use 1 CPU core and 1024 MB of RAM. Windows XP runs fine in this configuration as a VM, and I wanted to compare that experience with Windows 7. (Vista? Well, it runs OK on my Core2 Duo laptop with 4 GB - 3 GB accessible in 32-bit mode, but I never dared test it as a VM with one CPu core.)

Logging in and firing up Internet Explorer 8, then Windows Media Player, then Windows Explore, I noticed none of the choppiness and delays that have ocassionally plagued Vistaon my laptop install. I installed Firefox to get a feel for how UAC works in Windows 7. Everything worked fine. UAC prompted me for my OK, but there were no delays and everything went very smoothly. 

Browsing the Web on IE 8 and Firefox was snappy and smooth. I didn't get beyond that stage in my initial testing, so I can't report findings for professional tools like Eclipse or FlexBuilder. Also, using a VM, I was spared the process of installing specialized drivers for my particular hardware, so installing directly to the hardware may not be quite so seamless, though my guess is that vendors have already suffered the necessary pain with Vista to get their applications and drivers up to snuff, and Windows 7 will be a smooth transition. 

Overall, it is beginning to look to me like Windows 7 is the OS that Vista was intended to be- sleek, fast, and solid. For everyone that uses Windows, let's hope that is exactly how it turns out. As for me, will I switch back to Windows on my desktop? Probably not, but Windows 7 has at least created a conversation about it. I am mostly satisfied with WINE and my XP Pro VM for running Windows apps, and with all the application server work we do on Ubuntu, sticking with it on my desktop is the logical choice. Still, kudos to Microsoft for what looks to be a very nice Windows release. 

Microsoft Vista has been the punchline of a lot of IT jokes in the last year or so. I had an upgrade for my desktop from XP to Vista, but couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger and switched to Linux instead. I have been very happy overall with the switch, and I have added an XP virtual machine through KVM for maximum productivity. 

Ditching Windows on my laptop is not such an easy trick, though. My laptop is an HP TC4400 Tablet PC. My research has turned up very mixed feedback on porting Tablet PC functionality to Linux, and other issues, such as wireless and 3G network support, have been either flaky or difficult to deal with. Ubuntu 8.10 promises to fix the latter issue, but we'll leave that for another day. Suffice it to say that I was not prepared to move to Ubuntu on my TC440 just to prove a point, so I stuck with XP Tablet Edition.

In July, though, my laptop hard disk crashed. I didn't have a backup of the restore partition (hands up for anyone actually backs up the restore partition), and HP didn't have XP Tablet Edition media, so I opted for Vista Business, which includes Tablet PC functionality in the OS. 

To date, I have been extremely pleased with Vista. Like a lot of other developers, I feared all kinds of problems stemming from the Vista transition (how ironic that FUD has been the major obstacle to Vista adoption this year). Apart from some minor annoyances with the permissions scheme (which seems to resemble *nix far more than the XP scheme), I have found that Vista generally stays out of my way - exactly what I want in an OS.

Of course, the TC4400 is designed to work with Vista, and with 4 GB RAM, I have plenty of memory to run it cleanly. My advice to clients is to review your desktop/laptop specs before considering an upgrade to Vista from XP. Systems that are designed for Vista and have at least 2GB RAM should run just fine. I would not upgrade the OS on anything with lower specs than that. Instead, wait for the next hardware refresh cycle to replace old machines and get Vista (or perhaps WIndows 7 by that time, depending on your time frame for the hardware refresh cycle).