At work, I have a few choices about doing email. I can use Thunderbird and just do IMAP with our exchange server. I don’t get the calendar stuff that way. I can do OWA which is okay but it requires me to have a browser open. I can do Outlook Anywhere (or RPC over HTTPs). This means I run Outlook natively or in a emulation environment. There are choices for this:
Codeweavers Pro – Codeweavers has released version 8.0 which may work with Outlook. It has IE 7 integrated so it may work. In the past, it never worked and I tried for hours/days to get it working. It would mean that Outlook would show up in a true seamless mode on the desktop (Ubuntu desktop).
VMware – Player, Workstation only here. I want the unity mode which allows the windows applications to show in their own window and not have the desktop showing through. The desktop means I lose the window really and there is this coolness factor.
VirtualBox – My choice for a few reasons for this task. The seamless mode of VMware seems to mess up and it wants some heavy duty system to run it on. My T43 Thinkpad will not handle Unity mode. Moreover I don’t think its well worked out. Virtualbox OTOH, is quite suited for light weight systems and its seamless mode seems more developed.
Now down to what the ideal underlying OS is for all this. I approach this at a tool user level so it could be Windows Server 2008 or 2003. It could be Ubuntu AMD64 Jaunty. What works the best for me given my needs to run a single application? Windows seems to be a lot of OS to just run stuff. I would probably not use much of the underlying Windows goodness since I tend to veer away from Windows stuff in favor of Linux. So I think either Debian or Ubuntu make the best underlying OS. Perhaps that underlying OS is never really seen and you run the emulation full-screen. I just trust Linux more as a real system and Windows more as a virtual one. Whatever I run on top, be it VMWare, Codeweavers, or Virtualbox will thrive with Linux under there. If it misbehaves, I have the command line and SSH and “PS ax” to resort to. What do I use on Windows? There is no real command-line mode to shell into.
So, my selection is to run Windows virtually and Linux on the hardware. Its a “duh” factor type of thing. I just don’t trust Windows on real hardware. Not enough command and control. Windows does just fine when it can be killed by process controllers in Linux and rebooted safely. I can snapshot it, roll it back, make it sane again.
Lets face it. Windows 7 is a nicer cousin even undone. Still, I’ll choose to run it in a virtual space in a seamless mode with Linux underneath.
You all need to decide if Virtualization can work for you. If the answer is yes; ask yourself what you need from the guest at a tool level. One tool or ten? It may form what choice you make for the host OS. If its games you are after, this analysis does not really apply. I don’t do games. For me, its a dash of word, excel, and powerpoint on occasion; but mostly talking to our exchange 2007 server. Seems the best tool for that is outlook 2007. But it does not equate that I need to run it in real space…
