HEY GUIZE 8D LOOK OVER HERE

Cool! You're actually reading these posts now!

Make a thread and share something about yourself, don't be shy.

Here, I'll go first.

My name is Kristofer, but everyone calls me Kris. I am a college student currently majoring in Web Technologies. I have a huge interest in computers, both software and hardware, and only find further joy by seeing electronics put into applicable and useful solutions. I am an Open-Source enthusiast and heavily endorse Linux as a standard operating system. I am also a big fan of virtual machines and run several virtual environments on my desktop with VirtualBox (I also run a $50 VirtualBox headless server with two server VMs that run 24/7).

Aside from electronics, my hobbies revolve around graphics. I like to design interfaces and enhance photographs, but also like to paint digitally as well as illustrate (though I consider myself an extreme novice on the latter despite enjoying this hobby since a much younger age).

I watch anime, though not so much anymore due to time constraints and lack of personally interesting genre releases in more recent years. Ghost In The Shell is still my most favorite franchise of all time. I also enjoy playing MMOs or general multiplayer games as I find game challenges played with an interactive social environment to be a great source of fun.

I have too many short term and long term goals and project I want to accomplish to bother listing, but I will mention a few. In the near future, I want to develop a web presence via a blog and website. I already have color schemes/palettes I am trialing to use as part of my brand as well as various features and themes and software I want to develop for when that time comes. My long term goal is to develop a humanoid robot with a wide range of variable based intelligent responses and variable environment immersion animation libraries. :3 Yes I am dreaming, but it will keep me learning and building towards something.

That was lengthy... but feel free to challenge the length of my post with your own introduction thread. We would love to hear about you.

And Welcome to Turt.me!

There is an Incredible amount of portability and sandboxing ability within a virtual machine.
If you are unfamiliar with the term Virtual Machine, it's like a computer box that you are free to build or destroy however you wish in anyway you wish without inflicting the least bit of harm towards the hosting operating system (which most people heavily [HEAVILY] rely on), and then being able to make as many of these as you want and run them as long as you have the hardware to do it (which isn't that uncommon anymore). You can save sessions and return to them whenever you like. You can just pick up a virtual machine and make copies or move it to an entirely different computer (need to make sure dependency requirements are met first of course). You can purposely clutter a virtual machine full of viruses and destroy the OS entirely without causing any harm directly to your host computer (though I'm sure there are some hacked viruses that could manage to escape a virtual hard disk if you researched it, I can't imagine it would be possible by pure automation from within a guest VM however).

Because they make perfect sandboxes, I often use them to:
-try out new linux distros
-play with new server software I want to implement
-test software applications or visit websites I don't trust
-and just general sandboxing (best way to learn is by doing, VMs are like padded rooms for operating systems)

Because they are great with portability, I usually build a longer term VM to handle different tasks.

For instance, I have a VM I use specifically use for my schoolwork. I install Windows 7 on it and throw in some school software like MS Office and Cisco PacketTracer and whatever else I need. I can also install any other third party software that I might personally find obnoxious but is required for any one of my classes (such as a service software that starts when you log in and eats your memory address space). My web browser sessions are only used for school work in this vm, so I rarely have to worry about picking up malicious cookies from foreign sites that will steal my passwords. To top it all off, If I ever am in the middle of a big project and just want to stop everything I am doing instantly to play a game or eat/sleep or something else, I can just save the virtual machine session. I don't need to save and close every individual file and application then re-open them later, just save session, wait a moment, and it's there for me whenever I want it later, just like I left it.

I've used my desktop to build each of my server Vms because it has a vast amount of hardware abilities compared to the old Dell Dimension 8250 I put together for $50. Setting up and testing a server with a desktop machine allows you to cover much more ground at a faster pace. Once I have my virtual machine servers prepared how I want them, I can just toss them straight onto the old computer and have it ready to run very quickly. Saves time installing and testing and are just as quickly movable elsewhere. Plus since I base my LAN network IP addressing on MAC addresses, I don't even have to rehandle the VMs on the router as I can just leave them with their initial virtual MAC address.

Why do I use server VMs instead of just mashing it all together in one host server? Well, Again there is a flexible portability. To make a hard disk backup I could take a physical server offline to make a backup of the whole physicial hard drive with PartImage, or I could just copy a vm disk file and be done with it. Guess which one is faster as well as easier to archive (for anyone who knows better, yes, rsync is still a better short-term choice for risk management). The sandboxing thing is also relevant to servers as well. I have two seperate server VMs running because I want one to be accesible from the outside world (my way to talk to computer at home) and be concerned with the security measures while I have another vm that doesn't have to worry so much about someone being able to poke it from outside and can handle other, perhaps more important tasks. If one of my server vms do happen to corrupt or become destroyed, it simply means short downtime from the outside for me. I don't have to implement a previous backup for all of my other servers, such as my file server or log server or communications server. All I need to do is reload a previous copy of my virtual disk for that server, patch it up and everything is back to the way it was before.

I imagine that was a lot to read and while I tried to put it in layman's terms, the functions and features might still not make much sense. As with most Open Source software, I would encourage anyone to try Oracle's VirtualBox and put a virtual machine of their own together. There are a ton of guides on how to build a simple virtual machine on Google, but I might make a short guide or tutorial someday just for the fun of it.

TL;DR - Flexibility, Portability and Scalability is not just a concern for enterprise server admins.

nnnnope!
Unless I get to do it as a graded school project, I probably won't take a chance at it until after I'm done with school. I consider myself a growing novice at Linux, and while I would learn a lot from building my own distro, I am more than aware of how time consuming and how over-my-head that would be. Though if I do happen around the subject, I'll let you guys know about it. (side note, if/when ever I build my awesome robot, I will likely have to build the operating system, and it will likely be based off the Linux kernel)

Besides, I am of the opinion that there are already incredibly too many unkempt linux desktop distros out there. You can visit http://distrowatch.com/ and each time learn about some new linux distro that you'll never hear about again that is just Ubuntu wrapped with a new logo and name. If I were to join a distro dev team though, it would likely be http://elementaryos.org/ as they are making some pioneering effort into simplifying interfacing, and I like that.

That's quite the introduction!
I too have too many short term and long term goals and projects, and I haven't really started with any of them lol. Good to see you're making some progress with regards to your web presence. I also need to work on a web presence, but haven't gotten much done.

As for VMs, I also run a few on my laptops and desktops for experimenting. I actually intended to run a couple of VMs on my laptop specifically for development purposes (I like to keep my development environments separate), but unfortunately the VMs were quite slow. I figured having 4 gigs of ram and a dual core processor would be sufficient, but it wasn't. I'll probably have to rethink my development strategy now...

You sound quite a bit like me :3 I like to keep my development environments separate to avoid problems with mixed library versions and dependencies and >__< everything that could go wrong. If you are looking for lightweight Linux stuff, xfce is the best desktop environment I've found that resembles modern day desktop GUIs pretty well with low resource cost (Xubuntu is my suggestion for that). Even better, if all you need can be done entirely with a console, tmux and ssh is the way to be. 8) Though if it is Windows environments you need, I can't vouch for much other than MicroXP (which is incredibly light weight; <50MB total ram usage right after install completes 8D). I'm sure there are plenty of strip guides for light-weighting a newer Windows distro, though I've never tried to do it before. Either way, VMs won't help you too much if the hardware tax is too big. :x I can pull off having a Windows 7 VM running on my desktop (with Aero effects and decent Firefox session and a couple of other things running) and play a game like Red Eclipse at the same time (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, see "What are you Running" thread for full specs), but I can't pull off heavy process tasks in the VM without risking the machine from having a crash of some sort (just sort of locks up indefinitely).

If you want more ideas, I'd be glad to tell you more based on what I know and what you are trying to accomplish. I tend to learn new things that way.

@Kris: Yup, avoiding issues is the reason why I like to separate. Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not much of a Linux user, and I intend to develop on Windows machines. At the least, the environments I intend to have are 1) web design and development, incl. Python for Django web development. I prefer the tools I have on Windows, so I'd need Windows for that. 2) Windows platform development- so pretty much all of Visual Studio (the main suite + XNA, Metro, Windows Phone, etc.), and this would need to be on the latest Windows (7, and then 8) 3) cross-platform development. This probably wouldn't require Windows since I'd use tools like Qt or Code::Blocks, but again, I prefer Windows. Ultimately I'd need access to Linux and Mac too to fully develop and check, but this one isn't that important because it's really far into the future.

I probably could install Visual Studio and everything on my primary computer, but it's HUGE and would install so much stuff, and I'd rather keep my primary installation clean and minimal. However, MicroXP looks good! I didn't know about that, so thanks! I'll probably try that (say, for web dev). And by searching for that, I also found Tiny7, so I might look into that as well. If Tiny7 works out, I might just use that for most of my VMs. I have yet to attempt Hackintosh on my new laptop, but since my older laptop could handle it decently, I should be okay.

@Gary: Thanks Gary, and absolutely, I know who to ask . Since I intend to build Python web apps, chances are that I'll probably need a scalable VPS (I don't think HostGator reseller would be sufficient ), but I think I might use your hosting for my personal hosting and/or as a backup.

(Apologies to Kris for kinda hijacking the thread. )

It's cool, threads tend to do that when people are having actual discussions instead of seeking solutions.

I reed to indulge myself to pickup Qt. I've looked at it before and was hesitant because I was impressioned that it was maybe dying, but the fact that it is still around I guess proves otherwise.

If you are looking for machines that can be used for heavier processing, you might want to look at Amazon's EC2 servers. As low as $0.02 per hour and you can turn them off when you are not using them (and/or write scripts and design a system that turns them off when your website doesn't need the extra help serving users ).