Funky little devices
As of today, EasyVZ has crossed more than 500 downloads. It provides immense satisfaction that a piece of software that I wrote is used by many people. Not that it is a highly complex one. Anyone could have put it together. It is a simple piece of software. But it readily solves many pain points for users of OpenVZ, a container system for Linux that creates virtual machines with negligible overhead. Please have a look at OS level virtualization for further information.
Running traditional virtual machines like the free as in beer VMWare can be taxing if you have an older machine. Running multiple virtual machines with VMWare for development sucks up all resources on my Pentium D system which has 512M RAM. To try out the latest hardware assisted virtualization, I went and bought myself an AMD Athlon based system that features SVM. The Linux kernel, from version 2.6.20 onwards features KVM, that lets you run unmodified operating systems at native speeds! If your processor supports hardware assisted virtualization, that is.
Now running multiple systems is a pain, especially if you have limited desk space. I can’t have 2 sets of keyboard, mouse and monitor. A really nice thing to have now is a KVM (keyboard, video and mouse)switch. This lets you share those indispensable I/O devices among multiple systems. The ones that I have seen earlier provide a switching panel and can handle multiple systems. But I was running only 2 systems. So I got myself a simpler one from Chennai’s own Ritchie street. This neatly designed KVM switch can switch between PCs when the scroll lock is pressed twice in quick succession. This is an incredible tool! I really don’t miss manually switching cables when I needed to install different distributions. For other things, there is SSH.
Many of my friends, when they come visiting plugin their MP3 players into my PC to warm the batteries up. Computers have become so common that the MP3 player manufacturers have wired up the charging mechanism via the USB ports. You may sometimes, however feel the need for a traditional adaptor. During these times, you can make use of Swaroop and co’s ION. This is a pretty useful device providing the much needed USB port, sans the computer. The other end of this device is a standard power cable that you can shove into a wall socket. Your iPod/MP3 player couldn’t be happier. I think Swaroop and co must put this on eBay, it will give them good coverage. For Rs. 399, this is a neat device.