I was reading a great thread on LifeHacker.com today. They were discussing the merits of foregoing traditional software installation on Windows machines and going to portable-only or nearly the same. Most of the posters agreed that it was a boon for the speed of the operating system, but what about apps that won't go portable? Microsoft Office comes to mind, along with maybe Photoshop, SQL Server, IIS, and some antivirus software. Below is my reply, but the link to the thread is first:
Allmyapps Bulk-Installs Your Favorite Apps, Makes System Rebuilding Less Painful
"I have been using another approach that is working quite well. I have created a VM with VirtualBox and I'm installing all my development tools on that. I'm also putting some of my other apps on it, like MS Office.
What prompted me to do this was installing MS SQL Server 2008 on XP for a job I was doing. The install clunked out at 93%. I tried to reinstall but, of course, MS had done something funky with security settings. I tried to uninstall...nope. Failed there also. Tried using the MSI Cleaner Utility. Nope. Then tried a restore point. System Hosed. I had to completely reinstall Windows over MS' lack of ability to create a reliable installer. Office did that to me once also. Maybe if they didn't install 50,000 registry keys for a simple word processing program, they could make a better installer.
Now, ALL MS applications go into the virtual machine. Only games and some system utils get installed. XP runs pretty well in an appliance, even on my modest older system.
It prints, gets online, accepts USB things, reads my CDs, and most anything else without the first flaw. Not one crash yet. If it gets hosed, I have the fresh install system handy on a backup drive."
My older system, mentioned above, is an Athlon64 3400+ with 1.5GB of RAM. VirtualBox with a Windows XP guest runs pretty well on it. It's not really sluggish. It's faster on my Ubuntu host, but I game on Windows, so Windows gets to be the host usually.
My new system, purchased on 10/23/09, is a Phenom II X4 (Quad Core, 2nd gen Phenom) with 8GB of RAM and a faster HDD and Graphics card than the Athlon64 has. The VM isn't that much faster, but the host responds quite a bit better while the VM is running.
I really would like an answer as to why Microsoft MUST make installing their applications such a pain. Now, a couple of things are easy. Security Essentials is easy. Steady State is moody, so it's sometimes easy. Sysinternals is easy. Powershell is easy. That's about it. Every Application of any import is a hit or miss situation. Why? Why is it that Ubuntu applications seem to be able to install without all the mess? There are a couple that can give trouble, but really only a couple.
Some Linux programs are not as powerful as MS Office, but some are. GIMP is terribly powerful. OpenOffice.org is powerful. MYSQL is every bit the database that SQL Server is and can be installed by simply unzipping it! Please let me acknowledge the other Open Source DBMS's as well: PostgreSQL, Firebird, and any others I forgot. NO big, complicated installers.
I will give Microsoft credit. Windows 7 installs with one or two clicks. Then again, maybe that's too simple. Why can't they ever accommodate multiboot? They accommodate other Microsoft OSes. Why can't they recognize and accommodate BSD, Linux, Open Solaris, Hack OS X, or OS/2?
Well, sorry to get on a soapbox about Microsoft. I don't hate them, nor am I a Linux fanboy. I like Linux, but it's not ready for gamers yet. If it wasn't for games, I probably would make the switch. I think. MS media center is better than anything Linux is offering. But for my laptop, I have switched. Linux is great for work.
Put Windows into a VM. Don't forget to export it as an appliance after a basic install and update!
I might put a couple of images on here to show it underway.
Later...
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)