VIRTUALISE ALL THE THINGS

Fed up with breaking Linux installs, and Linux  installs breaking him, Jonni Bidwell looks to  virtualisation to ease his very real woes.

- Jonni Bidwell

Without virtualisation, life at Linux Format towers would be a lot more complicated. Testing the DVD would be a nightmare, reviewing new distros would require us to wipe the machine on which we installed last issue’s distros, and if we wanted to test new software on different distros, we’d probably need yet more hardware and yet more time. Yet if you rewind back to the late Mesolithic LXF age – the early 2000s – these were exactly the kind of hardware logistics that the team had to wrangle, all the  while living the wild lifestyle encouraged  by the heady golden era of dead-tree  publishing. Back then tech journalists  were made of stronger stuff.

Nowadays things are much more  straightforward. If you want to try a  new OS, or even if you just want to do  something a bit crazy with your current  one, all you need do is fire up a virtual  machine, and within minutes you have a  device that for all intents and purposes  behaves like a regular computer. Only  you don’t need to worry about breaking it  – anything you do can be undone, and no  one will come at you with pointed  questions/sticks if it breaks.