andrewducker: (Calvin's Brain)
[personal profile] andrewducker
Having tried a couple of different methods of carrying my state around with me I've settled on PortableApps versions of Thunderbird and Firefox. I really wanted to carry around a VM of Ubuntu, but what with everyone I know having USB 1.1 connectors on their PCs (making it very slow) and Ubuntu over VMWare not being able to hibernate (meaning it had to boot from scratch every time), it took 5-10 minutes from plugging in the USB stick to having my email. Which sucked.

The portableapps thunderbird takes about 7 seconds to load, which is much better. And with Foxmarks keeping my bookmarks in synch and ScheduleWorld keeping my Thunderbird contacts synchronised everything should be the same as it is at home. Oh - I've also got TabMix Plus and AdBlockPlus installed as well, obviously.

Oh well - eventually I'll have an excuse to carry around a linux distribution, but apparently not this week.

Date: 2008-03-15 06:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] call-waiting.livejournal.com
Is it not possible to save the state of a VMWare VM from VMWare rather than having to have the guest OS do it itself? I haven't used VMWare in a while, so I may be misremembering...

Date: 2008-03-15 09:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] terminalmalaise.livejournal.com
Indeed it is possible to suspend with VMWare, but USB 1.1 is going to suck no matter what, and even USB 2.0 is still a bottleneck. Of course, the other specs of a computer with only USB 1.1 are probably not the greatest either...

Date: 2008-03-15 09:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] call-waiting.livejournal.com
This is true, suckage is inevitable; but for basic email and web, a VM with 128 or 256Mb should be reasonable (so long as GNOME isn't involved...) which at 11Mb/s can be restored in about 11 or 22 seconds. Not as good as 7 seconds, of course, but better than 10 minutes, and more general-purpose than just mail and web.

Date: 2008-03-16 01:47 pm (UTC)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)
From: [personal profile] matgb
Gmail? That's what I switched to, not going back to a client now. Although it does support IMAP now.

Date: 2008-03-16 11:21 pm (UTC)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)
From: [personal profile] matgb
Really? I find that's the best bit—once I got used to it it was a godsend, especially if I'm on dial-up or using my mobile, can get all the message history really quickly.

YMMV I guess.

Date: 2008-03-17 11:15 am (UTC)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Science)
From: [personal profile] matgb
Fair—I star messages I want to get back to, especially useful in a long conversation.

Date: 2008-03-17 07:45 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] channelpenguin.livejournal.com
You, monsieur Ducker, are a big fat geek!! (but we love you that way!)

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