Patterns

Before I forget:

on Tuesday, the 29th of April the construction crew from Deutsche Telekom actually showed up and started digging a small hole directly in front of our house and added an amplifier + extra wire for our new phone line. As we left for vacation the next day I am kind of unsure of the outcome aka if I am now in a position to order VDSL. We shall see…

Initially I wanted to write about my positive experience with kvm+qemu but after several weeks of testing the following downsides became apparent:

• currently no support for AltGr
• no copy-and-paste support to/from host

As those issues actually prevented me from productively using guest images with kvm a colleague had the right hint at hand: Virtualbox.

I went ahead and installed the packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-16-generic and started testing it by creating various guest images using the simple to use gui. I even converted an existing kvm/qemu image to the virtualbox format using the following commands:

# vboxmanage convertdd image.img image.vdi
# vboxmanage modifyvdi image.vdi compact

Finally copy-and-paste is actually working, something even VMware never accomplished (at least under a Linux host). The CPU Hardware Virtualization support (see this post to check if your CPU has support for it) in combination with the Virtualbox Guest Extensions make the guests subjectively run even faster than on kvm/qemu (I did not clock this, though).

As you might have guessed from my fanboy rave positive posting I currently favor Virtualbox over all other solutions as it seems the right tool for my exact needs. As always your mileage may vary.

btw: AltGr works too…
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Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo T2400 1.83GHz
2GB Ram

I didn’t write a lot lately primarily due to the fact that I was pretty busy with work-related projects.

To give you a little update on the VDSL matter The following things happened in the past weeks:

• I received a call from a call-center agent to ask again whether I would really need an additional phone line instead of migrating my Arcor line over to Telekom
• Last week Thursday the local building team called to inform me that they would do groundworks this Tuesday at 07:30am!

Yep, you read correct. This could mean I would be finally getting the Telekom phone line installed this week. The moment of truth is getting nearer and nearer…

P.S.: For the ones that didn’t read all of the VDSL postings: Before I am able to place an order for VDSL with the Deutsche Telekom I need a phone line from them (which I currently don’t have). So only with a phone line I will be able to make an availability check and place the order. If you ask me how far I am in the whole process I would say probably somewhere around 15%. Not that much considering I started the journey on February 24th.

Stay strong! I will…

Yesterday I finished my first half-marathon in a beautiful net time of 01:58:45 (I would say that’s OK for someone that did not do that much training upfront). Of course this was only possible because I had the excellent pace-makers André and Stefan (www.gute-beine.de) helping me keeping the pace and faith (after 13km my mind started telling my body that it should stop). Thanks guys!

Today at 09:23h CET the Telekom called in to ask if I was to actually keep my current phone line from Arcor in addition to the new one from Deutsche Telekom. I assume they made the call in order to save money (a building team has to be sent out to actually install a wire) which is generally a wise step. I told the call-center agent that I am planning to keep the old line in addition to the new one for backup purposes and she confirmed that the building team is going to install the missing wire “soon^tm“.