Brand new (virtual) world

One thing is to understand a technology or even to use it, and other very different to realize the consequences of this technology have in your life. Today, I realized the full power or virtualization technologies and had a brief insight on how it will change the day to day experience for most computer users.

I recently got a new laptop, a a Toshiba Satellite M100-184 which came with Windows Xp home edition in Spanish pre-installed. I have the costum to have all my machines installed in English, to make my life easier. So, my first frustration came when I tried to install Windows XP Professional in english and even when I found most of the required drivers, I was just unable to get most of the hardware to work. Very annoying, indeed.

Then, I got and even bigger frustration: I expend most of my spare time during a couple of weeks trying to get openSuse installed, driving through numerous user forums and fighting with increasingly complex how-to's. As I use Linux as my primary development platform, this was more than a mere annoyance, it was a serious limitation. Had I known this before and I hadn't bought this particular machine.

Then, yesterday, I came to a better solution: create a virtual machine on top of Windows XP and get Linux installed there. It sounded easy and it was. I did a quick research on available open source tools, on which I basically considered Qemu and VirtualBox. This brief comparison and a short test of both tools made me decide for VirtualBox, mostly due to its usability and the quality of the documentation. Now, while I write this, I had suse installed in a virtual machine and ready to work, thanks to the "plain vanilla" virtual hardware that Virtualbox emulates.

This is a tremendous change for end users: no more hardware related complexities. Obviously, this has a price: not all hardware features can be exploit, but this less than a problem for more users, who will not use them anyway. Even more, you can port your working environment from one physical machine to another (for instance, between home and work). Also, you can have more than one virtual machine configured for special purposes. For example, my wife will love to have her old and familiar windows 95!

I foresee that soon hardware manufacturers will sale their machines with a small, simple, robust, efficient virtualization layer that offers a set of "standard" virtual machine configurations on which you can install the operating system of your choice. A kind of high level Bios. And yes, this virtualization layer will most likely be based on Linux. A trimmed down version, probably, but Linux after all.

So in the long run, we will get a Linux on each desktop, even if the user doesn't know.