A short aside
2011-Dec-15, Thursday 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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!
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Date: 2011-12-15 05:56 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2011-12-15 08:15 pm (UTC)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! :)
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Date: 2011-12-16 06:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-16 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-16 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-16 01:44 pm (UTC)And use git. Just because of GitHub. Or use Mercurial with GitHub. http://hg-git.github.com/
Also, IE VMs? http://browserling.com
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Date: 2011-12-16 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-16 02:18 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2011-12-16 03:00 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2011-12-16 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-16 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 08:34 pm (UTC)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 :)