[ILUG] Virtualisation, what the point?

[Timothy Murphy]

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 12:33, jm at jmason.org wrote:

> Key point for me -- imagine being able to install an insecure swiss-cheese
> PHP app like Gallery and *not* have to worry about all your important data
> getting pwn3d!

Some ignorant questions:

1) Is Gallery this photo gallery program?
If so, in what way is it insecure?

2) How exactly does virtualisation preserve your important data?

3) I bought a ThinkPad T20 (following your advice)
on this mailing list, for what I now realise was an absurdly low price
(thank you David H).
This was running some version of VMWare, which worked fine,
except that I could not make head or tails of peripherals.

I was amazed that it worked on 256MB of memory.
It reminded me of Dr Johnson's comparision of women preachers
with dogs that walk on their hind legs.
"While neither does it very well, it's surprising to see it done at all."

In the end, I decided virtualisation was strictly for pointy-heads,
and installed Fedora on a new hard disk (which I'm using now).

Do real people run Xen on their laptops?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland