A short aside

[chebe]

Half the screen on my laptop is broken, and at six years of age the insurance has expired. This means a momentous event is about to occur, the New Laptop. And I'm getting all excited. It's coming with Windows 7 (which I haven't tried yet), so I think I'm going to have to dual-boot it with linux. Probably Fedora, but I'll have to try a Live CD first to see if the USB problems I went through are hardware/driver specific. I have an existing Windows XP VM I'll probably set up under linux too. And I'm thinking of setting up a lamp stack on CentOS to play around with WordPress. Which means I might have use of the IE-testing VMs Microsoft made up. Also a full Eclipse set-up for Android development might be fun. Then there's also the software/IDEs for my music player and xBees that are Windows-only. Can I set-up my VMs in a third partition and have them happily accessed from either OS? That'd be neat. And a media partition too, which I could set up with rsync to external backup. Am I going to need software version control, if for nothing else then Arduino code? If so, which one? ... Maybe this is all just overkill. Then again, I am a computer geek ;) Oh the things I'm going to learn!

Comments

[vatine]

You probably want SOME sort of version control. What that is/would be... Try to stay away from CVS, it's old and has some interesting misfeatures.

Git MAY be the thing to choose. It's distributed, can do ad-hoc structures, pulling and pushing updates in all sorts of directions. It has network support and there's at leats a few "cloud-based" places to stash off-home copies of your source tree(s).

But, I'd advise doing at least a little bit of comparisons between Git, Subversion and Mercurial before you decide on which one you go with. And there's always the option of using more than one.

[chebe]

I've experience with CVS and SVN, and although I think it would be manageable for my almost-trivial scenario, why do that to myself?

Dreamwidth use Mercurial (and Subversion apparently), so if I get into the codebase here that might be a good option. Then again, I know a couple of enthusiastic Git users irl. I think you're right, research! :)

[vatine]

Research rocks. I don't think emulating me is necessarily the BEST idea ever, since I use at least two different VCs at home and none of those at work. It's even to the point that for one of my spare-time computer-mediated hobbies, I use versioned tar-balls for archiving purposes (but, then, the archived data is "LaTeX source, DVI, PDF, HTML and plain text" and only three of those go well in a classic text-based VC system).

[chebe]

Nothing wrong with old-school when it works :)

[vatine]

I found myself arguing against a shell-script construct today, because it has only been supported since the early 80s. But to my defense, I only mildly argued against it (in a "this is equivalent functionally, shorter AND works further into the past"). Yeah, old-school has its place. :)

[floatboth]

Mercurial is less popular, slower, but a little easier (commands are more specific, eg. git checkout == hg branch & update & revert). Read this: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/01/the-real-difference-between-mercurial-and-git/

And use git. Just because of GitHub. Or use Mercurial with GitHub. http://hg-git.github.com/

Also, IE VMs? http://browserling.com

[chebe]

Woah, hey, your solutions have the disadvantage of requiring money for decent usage. I prefer the free solutions, seeing as I won't be making money on any of this. If I set up version control it will be with my own local server. Similarly with browser testing, the IE VMs are free: http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/04/internet-explorer-for-mac-ie7-ie8-ie-9-free/

[floatboth]

Decent usage == private repos?

If you want to keep it on your machine, you don't need any server at all. You can push to BitBucket (unlimited private repos!) instead of GitHub for backing up, but GitHub is really great for open source projects.

And you can use Browserling for free, 5 minutes per session.

[chebe]

Browserling, 5 minutes per sessions (not nearly enough for testing in all browsers), while demand isn't high, for free, for now. That's not decent usage.

I'm not keen on letting third parties host my private code at all. Why would I do that? Disaster recover isn't a major concern. The only benefit would be on multi-person projects, which I'm not.

I'm sure they are good solutions for people who need them, I just don't understand this handing over everything to entities you don't know and can't trust.

[floatboth]

So you're working on something that's not open source and not for profit… just curious what it is :-)

[chebe]

It's just random bits and pieces, like tester programs on various devices, maybe some scripts, toys really. That if they ever come together properly and seem like they might be useful to other people might find themselves becoming little open-source projects. The need for version control comes from working on them from different physical and virtual machines. At the moment I have to search through several external hard-drives trying to find the newest version of the right file, it's a pain.

[altamira16]

Why would you do both dual boot and have virtual machines? It seemed like more people are leaving dual boot in favor of virtual machines. I have a Mac, and I use Parallels to run Windows in a virtual machine on it. Why would you want a third partition for your virtual machines?

[chebe]

I suppose my thinking is a bit loopy, but basically this isn't a work machine, or media server, or someone elses that needs to be up and running pronto. I've a smartphone for internet communication, and nothing else is time crucial, so I've plenty of leeway to play. And that's it really, this will be my 'hobby' machine. I'm going to do things just because it seems kinda cool to me, or simply because I got to wondering if it would work.

But also practically, I've paid for Windows (couldn't not), but I want to work in linux as my main machine. Easiest solution is to dual-boot so the only thing I compromise on is hard-drive space. And if I get into messing around with the linux kernel again there's just something so cool about having it running direct on hardware. (Then when you hear things like for a machine manufacturer to get Windows 8 certified they apparently have to use a BIOS that will prevent dual-booting, well, might be my last chance.)

Then why bother with VMs? Mostly testing, taking advantage of different features of different OSs as needed, while still keeping my personal OS as my personal space. In a third partition, in a format that both Windows and linux can use (while being able to keep a more performant/optimised format for the respective OS partitions) so that I can use them regardless of which way I booted. With the added benefit of limiting potential corruption or data loss.

Why not just VMs? I've been through the mill with VM software not working (not completely) so often that I simply don't trust it as reliable middleware. (And when a company buys your preferred one, like Oracle, that seems like it could take it away whenever it decides there's money to be made, or to stop supporting it, or just my OS, can't quite bring myself to put all my eggs in that particular basket.)

Plus, think of all the stuff I'll have to learn just to get it working! Give me enough time and I might end up with a real challenge like a BSD flavour :)