Total Immersion

Microsoft’s always going to have a hard time presenting a convincing green story for desktop computing. Its not that the story itself is un-sound: power-saving features are useful as far as they go, and Microsoft as a company is keen to be a good corporate citizen. The elephant in the room however may be summed up in a single, horrible word – bloat.

Microsoft’s story has been a fascinating one, one of the great success stories of the IT industry. There have been several key bets made along the way, which Messrs Gates and Ballmer have stuck to doggedly. This is not the place for a full précis of the Microsoft story, but it’s worth highlighting one of the bets: Moore’s Law, the principle (to paraphrase) that processor capabilities would continue to double ad infinitum.

In practice, this has been characterised by the long-standing truth well known by anyone who has spent the past couple of decades in the industry: that if you want to take advantage of the latest Microsoft software, you’ll have to upgrade your machine. The conversation has repeated with the same regularity as Moore’s Law itself – the bemoaning of how slow everything is running, and the wry nod from those who have seen it before.

Of course, this self-fulfilling prophecy has been of huge benefit to both Microsoft and its hardware partners – companies such as Intel. I very much doubt whether the Wintel alliance was deliberately stuffing software into the operating system just in order to shift more processor units, but one thing’s for sure – neither side was calling ‘stop’. We have also lived through the office bloatware wars, where Microsoft, Lotus and WordPerfect duked it out to see who could out-bloat the competition. (Microsoft won, as we all know)

The attitude throughout from Microsoft – and I know this very well, having asked them on various occasions – has been, “If you want to take advantage of the latest innovations, you’ll need to use the latest technology.” I remember a very public debate I had with Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s ill-fated “Get the Facts” General Manager where he told me that most desktop users wanted far more than just email and word processing. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.

And so, to Green. While Microsoft might not have been underhand in promoting the “new and improved” –  it’s a technology company, after all – neither can the company claim to being particularly green. Fundamental to this is the fact that the power consumption of a device is only a small percentage of its overall carbon footprint. Bottom line: replacing or upgrading a machine undermines any benefits that can be had from ‘new’ power saving features.

What can Microsoft do about it? Well, perhaps that operating system that has been derided as the most bloated of the lot – Windows Vista – could hold the key. At the heart of Windows Vista lies a perfectly sound operating system. There are two issues however – the first is in disk space taken up by installed, never to be used apps; and the second is in the memory requirements for unnecessary run-time services. It should not be beyond the ken of the bright sparks in Redmond to bring out their own tools to monitor what’s really necessary, and strip out anything that isn’t?

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Trouble is, it goes right to the heart of Microsoft’s core philosophy, and fear – that people might stop buying its software if there is insufficient “new and improved” about it. That’s a fair worry – but it’s happening anyway, as we see Microsoft having to extend support (yet again, with hastily invented acronyms no less) for Windows XP. The same principles could be applied to Microsoft Office – which has already seen a usability overhaul with 2007, now, how about a performance boost? What additional benefits can be achieved offloading tasks to Windows Live services? Etc, etc, the list goes on.

It’s a changing world we are in. While Moore’s Law may continue to apply, many organisations are finding they have more than enough processor power on their desktops to do their day to day work. If Microsoft is really serious about greening the desktop, it has an opportunity to use its position to drive some fundamental changes. The question is, does it have the strength of character to do so? The alternative may be business as usual for Microsoft, but it certainly won’t be green.

I confess, I nearly did away with Linux last week. Something was consistently going wrong and for the life of me I couldn’t work out what - the result was that, at far-too-regular intervals, my machine was hanging/locking/freezing. At first I took it as it came (good moment to sit back and stave off the back pain) but after a few weeks it was becoming untenable. Until - finally - I stumbled across the message threads (for example) that suggested setting “pci-noacpi” in the boot script. Blow me if it doesn’t work, though I’m sure I’m missing out on all kinds of clever stuff!

As a result, I’ve decided to stick with Ubuntu Gutsy as my base operating system, for the time being. There’s a whole stack of reasons - advantages and disadvantages - and I wouldn’t advise Linux (even Ubuntu) for just everybody. I’ll get round to documenting these over the coming week or so.

This shouldn’t necessarily be construed as some massive switch from Windows to Linux. There are still things I either need, or like to do in Windows, so I am sticking with a hybrid configuration; however, as already discussed, with its smaller footprint (about 650Mb of memory in active use, rather than the 1.2Gb I found was required for Vista in the same scenario) Linux is the preferred base OS for virtualisation. Perhaps the biggest leap of faith is the fact I have just deleted the dual boot: I’m finding that running XP in a VirtualBox virtual machine is just as usable, and far more accessible than having to boot into a separate configuation to access Windows-based applications. It also means I’m working with just one set of files, rather than synchronising between my virtual file store and real, though of course equally virtual file store.

This last point was quite an epiphany for me. At the start I was concerned about what might happen, should the virtual hard disk get corrupted… until I remembered I was equally concerned by (and experienced in) real disks getting corrupted. The answer, of course, was doing a backup. Then, of course, one remembers that everything is virtual, imaginary, made up combinations of electronic signals to give us the impression of data. Phew, but in a good way.

The configuration I have now is much simpler than trying to manage dual boot - there are less file systems to mount, less apps to install and keep up to date, etc. And of course, I can access all my applications at once. On the data side, I still need to delve deeper into questions of file sharing between base and virtual machines - in principle it is quite simple (for example, using virtual network shares in VirtualBox) but I still don’t understand how things like indexing are handled, or for example what is the performance hit on very large files, if they are accessed over a pseudo-network.

For now at least, everything is working fine, and so I can get on with writing about technology, rather than playing with it

This decision was a long time coming but I think it is the right thing to do right now: I have reformatted the hard drive on my laptop and replaced Vista with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, as the main operating system. I did this for a number of reasons: it’s probably worth going through them one by one.

Building a picture of Open Source today. “Desktop Linux is ready for the mainstream” we are told – but is it? And how to know without trying it for real? I had Linux running in a virtual machine on Vista, and it looked fine, but I tended only to play with it and not really put it through its paces. To give it a proper once-over there really is no substitute for putting it in as the “main” operating system. I should say up-front that this shouldn’t be construed as a comment on Vista, which I am actually getting to like (see below). The same caveat should be applied for other applications, proprietary or open source (for the record, however: I’m not in any hurry to move over to OpenOffice just yet!)

Testing virtualisation. There’s a variety of combinations of virtual environments that can exist today – one of the strengths and weaknesses of virtualisation (I am quickly discovering) is that anything goes. Linux on Windows, Windows on Linux, either or both on a hypervisor from either side; add to that the potential for running individual apps (e.g. with Wine or Softricity) or remote desktops and it all becomes very complicated indeed. I decided to start with Linux as, to be fair, Vista is already big, and I decided I could do without the base overhead. I’m now running virtual instances of Ubuntu server, Ubuntu desktop and Windows XP – see below.

Getting my hands dirty. Here’s the thing – I’m an old UNIX hacker at heart, and I kind of miss playing around with this stuff, which I haven’t really done since the 0.94 SLS days. It’s certainly been an interesting experience so far pushing a few of the boundaries of today’s desktop Linux and seeing what gives… or doesn’t. I’m also planning on doing a bit of programming again, most likely in Ruby on Rails, for which direct use of the LAMP stack seems more appropriate than developing in Windows and running emulators or indeed, virtual machines. Of course this will also help me build more of a picture of open source in general, or at least trigger a few conversations: see next.

Engaging with the community. There’s just so much happening in the blogosphere, and some of the most animated discussions come from developers and open source advocates. For me, this decision partially comes down to succumbing to the temptation and joining in – heaven knows I won’t be able to keep up but at least if I’m sharing some of the experiences I’ll participate more than just watching from the sidelines.

Avoidance of bias. It’s important in this job to be able to see all aspects, and I have felt uncomfortable in the past commenting on certain subjects without a full appreciation of how it feels to experience the other side of the coin. Meanwhile, Linux adoption is rife in Eastern Europe and Asia, making it even more important to understand what life is like for non-Windows users. Its worth doing this to get the balance right – not least because certain behaviours and expectations are very different. In Linux, for example, the attitude is very much “there will be a package out there” (the package manager lists twenty-three thousand packages, of which I have a paltry fifteen hundred installed) but the “out there” experience also extends to tweaks and fixes, so be prepared to muck in. The Windows “attitude” seems to be more, “I’ve paid for it, so it better work!”

Response to accusations of bias. I want to be able to talk about the good stuff that comes out of Seattle without being accused of bias, or being considered some kind of shill. At the risk (see, here we go) of facing the wrath of all those who feel Microsoft is the nemesis of the IT industry, I actually do, really believe they come out with some pretty good stuff. I also think Sun, IBM and everybody else comes out with good stuff. There’s plenty of good stuff out there, and I really don’t see why Microsoft should be excluded from the good stuff debate just because they had some sharp business practices in the past, or present. After all, who didn’t - and who doesn’t.

Finally, I secretly wish I had a Mac. No I don’t… well, yes I do but I’m not sure it would be the answer to my prayers, and I would be concerned about lock-in. Oh, the irony.

So, there we have it. It’s already been quite a ride, as I’ve tested out a number of Linux distributions, tools and configurations before settling on my preferred setup. Which is, Ubuntu Linux 7.10 running KDE, and hosting a virtual instance of Windows XP via QEMU/KVM for my Outlook Exchange client. For virtualisation, I did try out Xen, both from within OpenSuse and as XenSource Express, but neither supported laptop suspend/resume (and XenSource setup on a single laptop was becoming a pig. I’ve needed to do various tweaks and resolve a number of issues, as I started doing this I wondered whether this was a comment on Linux – but it could equally be due to my lack of current experience. I have set up a dual-boot configuration with Vista, but this does not boot by default so (for the time being) it is there as a security blanket.

Does it work? So far, so good. I’m having to use the command line more than a little, but to be fair this is largely due to using the virtualisation capabilities, which are outside normal (i.e. non-geek) behaviour I think. There are a few bugs and things I might suggest were done differently, if I were in a position to comment – which is exactly what I’m getting myself into here, so expect some further case notes on my own blog under the tag “geeking out” (these won’t appear on IT-Analysis or IT-Director if you’re reading this post on one of these sites.) I still need to get myself organised from a data standpoint – I’m configuring Samba as I don’t just yet want to trust my data to sit inside a virtual machine, for example! - and I also need to set up my external monitor for ease of switching screens.

Whether or not I can work like this is one thing. I am missing certain things, not least LiveWriter and the Vista Sidebar – as general remarks things are not quite as slick as Windows, but perhaps I haven’t got my configuration right yet. I’ll give myself a month or so like this, so I can establish whether or not I actually want to work like this. For now, the jury is out but I shall keep everyone posted.