Virtual Machines

Recently I had a 1 a.m. incident. You know that moment. It's 1 a.m. and your hard drive is making nasty noises and you are clear that you are in no state of mind to begin fixing the problem. I use CrashPlan, so I have regular backups of my data, but I've never found a good way of quickly restoring the OS after one of these episodes. I resolved to make a secondary data backup to an external hard drive and go to bed. The nasty sounding hard drive itself will have to wait.

I have know about Virtual Machines, but had never really dealt with them before. I started looking into them and decided the one that sounded the best was VirtualBox. I have tried a few OS images, running into quirks here and there.

I currently have working images of Debian Linux and Windows Vista Home Basic running under Windows Vista 64bit Home Premium. One I am happy with the performance and my skills in using VirtualBox, I'll replace the hard drive (which hasn't made the a fore mentioned nasty noises since that night) and load a Linux OS as the Host OS.


Downloads – Oracle VM VirtualBox

Run Windows Apps Seamlessly Inside Linux

SSHFS:

debian sshfs automount fstab - Google Search
Mounting Remote Directories With SSHFS On Debian Squeeze - Page 2 | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
How to: Mount Remote Directories using sshfs | Linuxers
SSHFS: Super Easy File Access over SSH | Linux Journal
SSHFS: Super Easy File Access over SSH | Linux Journal
SSHFS: Super Easy File Access over SSH | Linux Journal