I'm running this blog on a windows vista netbook running a VM
I have an asus eeepc netbook that recently had a screen-breaking incident (paw-shaped cracked area in the LCD). This seemed like a good fit for running a headless server of some sort. It had 2GB of RAM and 2x1.5ghz intel atom cores, so it's not that far away from an m1.small EC2 instance in terms of performance. This blog was previously run on a VMWare Server image on top of my Windows 7 media PC, which had plenty of extra CPU power, but only 3.25 GB of usable memory to begin with (and I like to play games that use lots of memory).
The natural solution was to put linux on the netbook and move the 2 linux VMs over. I need an OS that supported my netbook hardware and could run VMWare server (I didn't try to switch to hypervisor or anything newer, since it seemed unlikely to support my netbook hardware). I tried the follow OS combinations, in order:
- Ubuntu 10.04 - cannot install VMWare server
- Ubuntu 9.10 - cannot install VMWare server
- Ubuntu 8.04 - VMWare server works, cannot install network drivers easily
- Ubuntu 8.10 - VMWare server works, cannot install network drivers easily
- Windows XP - bluescreen during kernel load on setup
- Windows Vista - worked perfectly
This is rather embarrassing, since I'm no fan of Vista, and I'm sure there's a better solution with VirtualBox or another VM solution that isn't as old as VMWare server.
