Installing Karmic Koala in VirtualPC - a great relief after Windows 7

After my fun and games with Windows 7 yesterday, I downloaded the latest alpha build of Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala - to have a look at the new and emerging features, but also just to check how this installed with VirtualPC v3.02, and was it quicker and any easier. The resounding answer is definitely yes. I just pointed the virtual CD/DVD drive to point to the downloaded iso image and started the virtual machine.

I booted into the live cd and had a look around first, no issues, everything just worked. I then clicked on the install icon, and six screens later clicked on install, must have taken me five minutes in total. The install to the virtual hard disk took another ten minutes including installing the tools and voila , I now have a fully functioning, fast booting OS to explore. What a difference to yesterdays downloading fest. and installing three applications to just stand still.

That is the big difference, after that 10 minutes, everything is installed and ready to go, the photo album manager, music player, browser, full office suite, photo editor, voip tool, IM tool, etc etc and the candle stick maker.

I have absolutely no doubt that if every user had to install Windows 7 from scratch and all their applications , people would love it a whole lot less, and it is one of the reasons that the pre-installed monopoly for Microsoft is such a bad thing for consumers and the computer industry.

I just hope that Larry Ellison of Oracle fame now throws his hat in the ring and does something interesting with open source on the desktop, along with Google, Debian, RedHat, Canonical, Novell and Apple. I think we can say for the first time since IBM and OS/2, Microsoft has some serious and large competition to it's monopoly. I hope everyone delivers on this potential, as the real winners will be all of us.

Windows 7 a lot of money for not very much

I keep around an old windows XP virtual machine for things like CV's that agents will only take in word format, and I haven't been bothered to change it over to Google docs yet, but I will. So this VM gets powered up now and again on my Ubuntu Desktop to do this one task, and then it gets put away again.

So I thought I would take the Windows 7 7100 build for a spin and try it in VirtualPC, as I had already built a test VMware one. Well, the install went pretty well and once it had rebooted I was sat with an empty desktop, with no applications again. I fired up IE8 so I could download Mozilla Firefox, and it forced me to go to the Microsoft home page. I then downloaded some anti-virus software - AVG - and installed the Virtual PC drivers, another reboot.

I finally installed all the Microsoft patches and another reboot. It must have taken me about 45mins in total, to end up with a working virtual instance, and all I had installed was a browser and the anti-virus. Now that's OK, as I will put on my copy of Office, and I can continue to edit those CV's, but I then got to thinking about the point of this.

With virtualization and the standard hardware reference model that you get, I don't ever need to upgrade my XP virtual image, and it will continue to work until I can be bothered to move it to Google Apps. I know you won't be able to get security updates etc, but then I don't use it for seriously surfing the web anyway. I can also run it with no network connected if I wanted, and isolate it from the outside world , simply for it's legacy value.

So the question here is, why would I possibly spend £200 on Windows 7, the answer is I won't. When the RC runs out next year, then I will just delete the VM and that might be the driver I need to move over to Google apps completely.

I think a lot of people need to think very hard about upgrading to Windows 7, it might be new and shiny, but what exactly are you getting for you hard earned money. In my opinion not a great deal. Especially when you could go and buy a brand new Acer Netbook for £149 with all the software you could want, and spend the rest on treats for yourself.