Yes, an Eee PC can run 10 operating systems in parallel | Hacker News Reader

Yes, an Eee PC can run 10 operating systems in parallel

sam.ai.ki

54 pointssswam31 comments

It's funny how you can now refer to a 1Ghz/1GB machine as a 'not very powerful' computer with a straight face.

Your average computer scientist would have given his right arm and his first born for such a machine not all that long ago.

Sure qemu is efficient, but that little machine is plenty powerful in its own right. The fact that you normally don't actually use much of that power is why you can do this in the first place!

Amen.

I'm usually taking my personal AspireOne on business trips. Our operations guy refuses to stock netbooks because they are "underpowered". And, at least once I had our contractor remark that it's impossible to work on such an underpowered machine - while it was happily rebuilding Linux kernel at that very moment.

The thing's so much lighter and compact than company laptops, it makes huge difference when you have to climb a 70m tower with it, or unfold it during 13-hour flight. And most typical tasks in personal computing are not resource-intensive at all.

I think it's all relative to what you're doing at the moment. I have this scary machine as a desktop here, that basically functions as a glorified terminal most of the time, but when I start coding I'm so happy that it is as large as it is.

But that's mostly due to software bloat and a memory hungry strategy, I'm sure you could do the same stuff with a much smaller machine if programmed more efficient.

I'd hate to travel with this rig :)

I got an HP mini this week, runs Ubuntu 10.04 very nicely, and has a lovely matte screen. It was the only laptop in shop with a nice matte screen, even the super $3000 3d laptop had a glossy screen! Who wants a glossy screen, are they insane?

I deliberately use slower machines so that I write more efficient code!

It could be that most laptop manufacturers are copying Apple's glossy-only-unless-you're-rich Macbook design.

Which is - I'll agree with you on this - rather ridiculous.

Glossy screens have a much higher contrast ratio, aren't covered in plastic and are much easier to clean. You can easily stick a matte layer over the glass if it's that much of an issue.

Can you recommend a good matte cover? I was just going to replace the entire screen on my MacBook.

The anti-glare film from PowerSupportUSA.com is the best computer accessory I've ever bought.

Thanks! Ordered.

I think it is more of a what people want thing as glossy displays do look prettier when glare and other factors are not interfering.

Apple was actually quite late to the glossy party. Side by side glossy screens are preferred by customers, at least in the short "Pepsi challenge" comparison.

the reason being something along the lines of "oooh, shiny!"

Practically every monitor in our office is of course matte. If they were glossy displays, we would really be struggling to read any text on them! Perhaps this is more of a problem for people like me who prefer white-on-black.

> I deliberately use slower machines so that I write more efficient code!

That's a good trick. Runners do something similar: http://www.nefitco.com/weightvestarticleuk.html

qemu is efficient?

It uses a fairly small amount of RAM / RSS for the emulator, I was impressed that it could run 9 operating systems in 1GB and not too much swapping was going on. I know that normal virtualisers like xen are faster.

What matter to me is how they perform under load. IO/network/cpu benchmarks between your 10 VM would be probably more interesting.

Not really. There is no way they are not going to suck, even just one does not work that well.

I wouldn't do well under load, but it was fine for running an interactive shell without X. There might be a bit of swapping when switching your attention from one VM to another, only a few seconds. Qemu is a nice way to try out some different systems! I'll try running the VMs on my new mini laptop and see how that goes.

How does one install a MacOS in a VM? Does Apple allow it?

Hackintosh. And no, not to my knowledge.

Why?

That's what people wondered when Twitter and Facebook (and many other "projects") were first launched. Pun aside, what I mean to convey is that experimentation is a vital aspect for innovation and hackership.

Yes, remind me of an old quote.

They laughed at Newton, they laughed at Einstein... but they also laughed at Bobo the clown.

Just because someone asks why is not positive thing.

> That's what people wondered when Twitter and Facebook were first launched.

And some people still do.

("Get off my lawn" is cool, right?)

Where's the pun in that?

The pun is in the irony. Many people still question the usefulness of Twitter and Facebook.

Maybe because it isn't useful to everybody?

Is anything (non-biologically-necessary)?

why? because an Eee PC was the only desktop box I had available at the time, and I wanted to test the portability of a program to various different systems.

Cool. I didn't mean to criticize, just wondered what the use was.

I guess the main thing that came out of it was finding out how to run NetBSD and OpenBSD in recent qemu, which is not totally obvious, they didn't work out of the box. It took a bit of searching around and asking questions!

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