Re: Raid 0 setup doubt.

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Jose Otero posted on Mon, 28 Mar 2016 22:30:56 +0200 as excerpted:

> Duncan, you are right. I have 8 GB of RAM, and the most memory intensive
> thing I'll be doing is a VM for Windows. Now I double boot, but rarely
> go into Win, only to play some game occasionally. So, I think I'll be
> better off with Linux flat out and Win in a VM.

LOL.  That sounds /very/ much like me, tho obviously with different 
details given the timeframe, about 20 years ago.. and thru to this day, 
as the following story explains.

This was in the first few years after I got my first computer of my own, 
back in the early 90s, so well before I switched to Linux when the 
alternative was upgrading to MS eXPrivacy, starting the weekend eXPrivacy 
was actually released, in 2001.  So it was on MS.

When MS Windows95 came out, I upgraded to it, and normally stayed booted 
into it for all my usual tasks.  But I had one very favorite (to this 
day, actually) game, Master of Orion, original DOS edition, that wouldn't 
work in the original W95 -- I had to reboot to DOS to play it.

I remember what a relief it was to upgrade to 95-OSR2 and finally get the 
ability to run it from the DOS within W95, as that finally allowed me to 
play it without the hassle of rebooting all the time.

That's the first time I realized just what a hassle rebooting to do 
something specific was, as despite that being -- to this day -- my 
favorite computer game ever, I really didn't reboot very often to play 
it, when I had to actually reboot /to/ play it.

Of course W95OSR2 was upgraded to W98 -- at the time I was actually 
running the public betas for IE4/OE4 and was really looking forward to 
the advances that came with the to that point IE4-addon desktop 
integration, and I remember standing in line at midnight to get my copy 
of W98 as soon as possible.  At the time I was volunteering in the MS IE/
OE newsgroups, programming in VB and the MS Windows API, and on my way 
toward MSMVP.

But that was the height of my MS involvement.  By the time W98 came out I 
was already hearing about this Linux thing, and by sometime in 1999 I was 
convinced of the soundness of the Free/Libre and Open Source approach, 
and shortly thereafter read Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the 
Bazaar" and related essays (in dead-tree book form), the experience of 
which, for me, was one of repeated YES!!, EXACTLY!!, I didn't know others 
thought that way!!, because I had come to an immature form of many of the 
same conclusions on my own, due to my own VB programming experience, 
which sealed the deal.

But while I was convinced of the moral and logical correctness of the 
FLOSS way, I was loath to simply dump all the technical and developer API 
knowledge and experience I had on MS Windows by that point, and truth be 
told, may never have actually jumped off MS if MS themselves hadn't 
pushed me.

While I had played with Linux a bit, I quickly found that it simply 
wasn't practical on that level, for much the same reason booting to DOS 
to play Master of Orion wasn't practical, despite it being my favorite 
game.  Rebooting was simply too much of a hassle, and I simply didn't do 
it often enough in practice to get much of anywhere.

But it's at that point that MS first introduced its own malware, first 
with Office eXPrivacy, then publishing the fact that MS Windows eXPrivacy 
was going to be just that as well, that they were shipping activation 
malware that would, upon upgrade of too much of the machine, demand 
reactivation.

To me, this abuse of the user via activation malware was both a bridge 
too far, and 100% proof positive that MS considered itself a de-facto 
monopoly, regardless of what it might say in court.   After all, back in 
the day, MS Office got where it got in part because unlike the 
competition, it didn't require clumsy hardware dongles to allow one to 
use the software.  Their policy when trying to actually compete was that 
they'd rather their software be pirated, if it made them the de-facto 
standard, which it ultimately did.  That MS was now actually shipping 
deactivation malware as part of its product was thus 100% proof positive 
that they no longer considered anything else a serious competitive 
threat, and thus, that they could get away with inconveniencing their 
users via deactivation malware, since in their viewpoint they were now a 
monopoly and the users no longer had any other practical alternative 
/but/ MS.

And that was all the push it took.  By the time I started what I knew by 
then was THE switch, because MS really wasn't giving me any choice, I had 
actually been verifying my hardware upgrades against Linux compatibility 
for two full years, so I knew my hardware would handle Linux.  But I just 
couldn't spend the time booted to Linux to learn how to actually /use/ 
it, until MS gave me that push, leaving me no other viable option.  But 
once I knew I was switching, I was dead serious about it, and asked on my 
then ISP's newsgroup (luckily, that ISP had some SERIOUSLY knowledgeable 
Linux and BSD folks as both ISP employees and users, one guy was one of 
about a dozen with commit access to one of the BSDs, IDR which one, but 
this is the level of expertise I had available to me) for book 
recommendations to teach me Linux.  I bought the two books that were 
recommended by multiple people on that newsgroup, O'Reilly's Running 
Linux, which I read all 600 pages or so very nearly cover to cover, and 
Linux in a Nutshell, a reference book that I kept at my side for years, 
even buying a newer edition some years later.

Because I knew if I didn't learn Linux well enough and fast enough for it 
to become my default boot, and remove enough reasons for MS Windows to be 
that default boot, it simply wasn't going to happen for me.  And with the 
MS push off their ship highly motivating me, come hell or high water, I 
was determined that *THIS* time, it *WAS* going to happen for me.

Which it did.  I installed Linux for the last time with MS as a dual 
boot, the same week MS Windows eXPrivacy was released.  It took some 
intensive effort, but by three months later, I was configuring and 
building my own kernels, configuring LILO to work the way I wanted 
because I wasn't going to be satisfied until it either did so or I had a 
hard reason why it couldn't do so, and configuring xf86config to handle 
dual graphics cards and triple monitors, because I'd been using the same 
dual card, triple monitor setup on MS Windows98, and again, I was either 
going to get it working on Linux as well, or be able to explain precisely 
why it couldn't (yet) be done and what efforts were under way to fix the 
problem.  That took about six weeks.  The second six weeks of that three 
months was spent figuring out which desktop I wanted to use (kde), 
figuring out which of the many alternative apps fit my needs best, and 
configuring both the desktop and those apps to behave as I wanted/needed 
them to behave, again, with the alternatives being that they'd either do 
it, or I'd have a very good reason why neither they, nor any of the 
alternatives available, could do it.

At first, particularly before I figured out how to get the three monitors 
working, I was still spending most of my actual productive time on the MS 
side, using MSIE and MSOE to search for and at times ask my ISP's 
newsgroup for answers to why the Linux side wasn't working the way I 
wanted and needed it to work.  Once I got the kernel configured and 
rebuilding (necessary for the graphics cards I was running), and XFree86 
running with the two graphics cards and three monitors, things started to 
move faster, tho I was still rebooting to MS Windows98 to use IE/OE to 
get answers, until I had a browser and news client config I could feel 
comfortable with on the LInux side.

By the three month mark, I had everything configured more or less to my 
liking on the Linux side, tho of course I continued to tweak and still 
continue to tweak, and had in fact reversed the previous situation, to 
the point that when I'd boot to the MS side to take care of something 
there that I couldn't do on the Linux side yet, I'd sit there afterward, 
wondering just what else there was to do on MS, just as I had previously 
done on Linux, when I had been simply playing with it, before MS gave me 
that push off their ship with the eXPrivacy malware that was simply 
beyond what I was willing to take.

Within about six more months, so nine total, I had gone from booting to 
MS every couple weeks to take care of some loose end, to every month, to 
every couple months.  By nine months in, I had migrated the files I 
needed over, and had uninstalled and deleted most of the one rather large 
set of power tools addons and toys I had used on the MS side, shrinking 
the MS partition accordingly.

I basically didn't boot to the MS side at all after 9 months or so, tho I 
kept it around, unused, another 9 months or so, until about the year and 
a half mark, when I decided I could better use that space for something 
else.  Still, I kept the MS Windows 98 install files, which I had copied 
off the CD back when I was still on MS to make reinstalls faster, around 
for awhile, and finally deleted them at about the two year mark, keeping 
the install CD itself, as my final link to MS, around for another year or 
so after that.

But that favorite game, Master of Orion, original DOS edition?  I still 
play it to this day, in DOSBox these days.  In fact, it's the only (non-
firmware level) slaveryware (in the context of the quote in my sig) I 
still have and run, tho of course DOSBox, the VM I run it in, is 
freedomware.  While I no longer accept any EULAs or agree to waive my 
rights regarding other slaveryware and thus couldn't legally run pretty 
much any other slaveryware (including flash and nVidia graphics drivers, 
for instance) even if I wanted to, I long ago accepted the EULA on Master 
of Orion, and pretty much simply didn't ever unaccept it.  Yes, that 
/does/ make it, and the four software freedoms and thus to my mind human 
rights disrespecting authors that created it, my master, and me its 
slave, it's a slavery I've not yet freed myself from... in that one 
instance, anyway.

Tho were I to have to reboot to run it, I expect I'd find myself freed of 
that slavery rather fast, because as I said, I Just. Don't. Find. 
Repeated. Rebooting. Practical. For any reason.

Ironically, tho DOSBox may have initially helped free me from the slavery 
of the MS platform as it gave me a way to continue to play that game on 
Linux, these days it's helping keep me a slave to that last bit of 
favorite game slaveryware, even after I've long since slipped the bonds 
of all the other slaveryware.

So, umm... Yeah, an MS platform VM (tho DOSBox is freedomware and I don't 
actually run MS DOS or whatever in it, it emulates that) on which to run 
a game or two... thus avoiding having to dual-boot to an MS platform to 
do so... sounds rather familiar to me!

Fortunately, other than the dosbox executable and *.conf file, and the 
associated libraries, etc, plus the associated game files, this 
particular VM and the platform emulated within, are DOS-era small, and 
thus 100% virtualized in memory, no big VM image file to worry about and 
get fragmented due to modification-writes on a COW-based btrfs. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman