The area of virtualisation is one of rapid development and you should investigate more widely before making any decisions.
There are several options for Windows virtualisation, including:
Coping with Windows applications on Linux is probably the biggest problem that you will face. Your options are:
In fact there is some shared parentage with these, for example all three are UNIX originated, and Apple Mac OS X has, as I understand it, come from BSD. This means that all three of these operating systems have the power of a UNIX base, giving them many advantages over Microsoft Windows systems, including in my experience:
Sometimes you want to catalogue your movies with thumbnail images from the movie.
$ ffmpeg -itsoffset -240 -i themovie.mpg -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 thumbnail.jpg
$ ffmpeg -itsoffset -240 -i themovie.mpg -vcodec png -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 thumbnail.png
If, like me, you have your laptop permanently on whilst you watch TV, then MythWeb is going to be a shock, a delightful shock. Imagine, from the comfort of your sofa, with your laptop on your lap:
After a week spent trying to install our Debian Lenny LTSP server, with the clients failing to boot with an error “rpc failed: 2”, and everyone I spoke to baffled as to how this could occur, I decided that enough was enough, and deleted the partitions and started again. Within 2 hours the server was back up and running without any of the same problems.
#! /bin/bash
for a in *.dvr-ms; do
if [ -f "$a" ]; then
b="${a%.dvr-ms}"
ffmpeg -i "$a" -vcodec copy -acodec copy "${b}.mpg"
fi
done
Initial impressions weren’t that great, but I have to say that mythtv is winning us over. The turning point was when we switched on mythweb. Mythweb does several things, but most notably it provides the program listings in a much more usable format than via mythtv This makes it must easier to browse and search the listings and record programs. And with a little extra work, it should be possible to make this accessible over the web. This feature gained huge spouse approval.
I finally obliterated Microsoft Windows XP Mediocre Centre from our living room. I know one shouldn’t indulge in Microsoft bashing, but I have earned the right after suffering with that atrocious system for the past five years. I would go so far as to say that my experience with that machine over the past five years is the number one reason I use Linux on the desktop today.
Local floppy drives do not seem to work well under LTSP, in any case they are obsolete technology. This page describes how to disable under LTSP5.
Find and edit the following file and comment out the legacy floppy drive command: