Centos 7 diary entry

As mentioned below, as I go off MacOS, I have been investing more (precious) time getting a Centos 7.0 desktop fully functional. Mail is up and running in the shape of Thunderbird, which I preferred over Evolution. Neither seem particularly customisable (particularly fonts) but Thunderbird seems to have the edge.

My next major requirement is virtualisation. I didn’t have any luck with VMware Player as a first attempt. It loaded some kernel modules and I pointed at my existing vmx files but the VMs didn’t boot and now the player just crashed with a couple of error lines in the USBArb log.

In any case, I wanted to use KVM on Linux and have reached the milestone of building a Centos 7 guest VM using VMM and qemu-kvm (after overcoming the obligatory hurdles, luckily relatively minor). I don’t have much faith in VMware and KVM working together although there’s no reason why they shouldn’t (VMware player is a type 2 hypervisor, or is it?) Things are complicated enough as it is without trying to run two hypervisors on the same machine!

Next experiment is to get my Windows desktops currently running under VMware workstation on Ubuntu into QEMU/KVM.

I’m Almost Done

With MacOs, that is. My latest frustration is with a bug, or something recently introduced into Yosemite which resulted in Time Machine deleting my entire backup and starting again. Because I sometimes plug in another disk to make another backup. It took me a couple of iterations to work this out and I have had to do two full 600G backups of my Mac to QNAP over the network recently. Because it’s QNAP, it’s not supported of course.

This is the second big blow to MacOS on top of the last howler of not being able to open older versions on Pages and Numbers documents after I upgraded 18 months ago.

Trying to debug these issues is hard. MacOS has become so much bloatware. And slow as a mollusc with lumbago.

Centos 7, on the other hand is clean, fast and functional. Simple too, compared to Macs, it seems to me. This is going to be my next desktop full time next time Apple mess up my data.