PCLinuxOS

My Background
Long time ago (1990-1995), I heavily involved with AIX (IBM version of Unix that run on RS/6000) and other IBM Operating System (OS/400 for AS/400 and SSP for S/36). I even put a big sticker "I love AIX" at the back of my car so everyone could see it. At home I had a lab consisted of one unit of RS/6000 machine and one PC running OS/2, DOS, SCO Unix and Linux...

Below are some of my findings :

• AIX was very fast & efficient OS to run engineering applications
  
• OS/400 & S/36 was very fast & efficient to run database applications (especially in financial industry)
• OS/2 was the first multitasking OS, good and reliable, but needed a very powerful PC. Otherwise the OS would run very slowly and frustrating
• SCO Unix - was OK until a power failure hit the system. I often heard that SCO system admin must reinstall the whole thing due to power failure the night before. I believe it's caused by a poor file system design compared to OS/400 & S/36
• Linux (still experimental) was OK for playing only. There were a lot of modified unix command with funny names and description in the man pages
  
• DOS - well, this is a simple OS, that crashed every time. However, it support many applications on PC, so I stick with it :-P
  

Anyway, I put high expectation on the Linux system, and hoping that some day in the future I could use Linux in my laptop computer. I have tried many Unix and Linux distro before gave up at year 2000 because I couldn't find good business applications comparable than Microsoft Office suite. I tried Linux to replace Windows 95 for one month, and it really made me unproductive. As an engineer I created and exchange Visio network diagram, and no Linux program compatible with Visio...

However things are going to change with the current release of PCLinuxOS.

It's all begin with Beryl
Djony, a friend of mine, told me that he tried PCLinuxOS with Beryl successfully. He said, he used only livecd, but he could mimics Vista 3D appearance very precisely, and that was done using old laptop with standard configuration...

I was very interested and I started to download the ISO image at home using torrent. The ISO images was finished the day after.

By Indonesian standard, the download time is quite fast, and even the link was only 128kbps, Indonesian service provider called it "Broadband".... My Japanesse friend Jimmy-san laughed in disbelieved when I mentioned that I have 128kbps broadband at home.

According to Jimmy, broadband connection should be similar to the one he used at home in Tokyo (I can't remember but I think he mentioned 1Gbps connection to home). Well, Jimmy my friend, some service provider in my area planning to put GPON with 30Mbps connection to home. It's not as fast as your connection, but it's like a dream for me :D (when it's available & affordable).

Djony was right. The LiveCD performance was very quick and smooth running on my IBM T42 laptop (it was configured with 2GB DRAM). Then I installed it in my spare disk drive, and it run even faster. The boot time was about 30 second, compared to my XP installation which was more than 5 minutes....

In my opinion, Beryl performance is very fast, effortless, and took no CPU penalty, even when running multiple applications : Microsoft Office 2003 (on crossover), Windows XP with Office 2003 running (on VirtualBox), and many other applications (i.e. Firefox, Kopete, etc.). I even tried more than one VirtualBox guest OS (2 instances of Windows XP, and one latest Gnome Linux). All running very fast - with the exception of the Gnome Linux, and with minimal disk swapping (only some hundreds Kilo Bytes taken for swap). I remembered when I use native Windows XP, Windows always utilize the disk swapping that causing performance drop (unless, ofcourse, we disable the disk swap).


After did full testing for about 2 days, I made a significant decision - I deleted the Windows XP and replaced it with Linux (PCLinuxOS) completely. However, I still let my data stored in separate 100GB hard disk (NTFS partition) untouched, and now mounted as read only by the Linux. The 100GB disk is almost full anyway. It's full with data, and I don't have any requirement to make it read/write (at least today).

First Week Experiences
First week was easy, but need some change behavior :

• Cisco VPN Client (was GUI based on XP) now replaced by command line - it works, but need some adaptation. I have a hard token generator, so switching from one OS to another would not issue any problem for me
• Microsoft Outlook 2003, now running on CrossOver (based on Wine) - it works fine, and no performance degradation compared to WindowsXP one, but the font was not as nice as the WindowsXP one. I tried the Evolution Mail, but it's too buggy for me (since we use Microsoft Exchange Mail Server in our company), so stick to Microsoft Outlook was the best option
  
• The rest of Microsoft Office 2003 applications (Outlook, Word, Visio), now running on VirtualBox. I did tried the Open Office.org, but performance was not acceptable, because I had a lot of document with vector graphic inside, and OO.o was very slow when dealing with vector. VirtualBox was much faster. I also tried to run Microsoft Office 2003 with CrossOver, but the performance also not acceptable
  
• X1 Desktop search (was an excellent search engine in XP), now replaced with Beagle search. Beagle is very CPU consuming during indexing, and can not index Outlook Mailbox (because it runs on crossover/wine), but Beagle is good enough (until I can find better replacement)
  

Optimized Windows XP for VirtualBox
I created a very small Windows XP ISO images (less than 150MB) to run inside the VirtualBox. The complete image with all Microsoft Office 2003 (plus Visio) is around 1.4GB uncompressed, and down to 800MB compressed (tar.gz). The boot time is amazingly fast, less than 20 second from cold boot (inside the VirtualBox). And shutdown time also very quick (around 2-3 second).

If you are interested to create a very small ISO image for XP, try : nlite. Use nlite to delete all unnecessary components of XP. You could also delete all drivers, but you need to be prepared with the full ISO image, and also ISO image for the drivers (taken from original XP installation). Just in case the slim XP version does not recognize your hardware and asked for a driver.....

In Progress

1. Finding the best replacement for Microsoft Office 2003 (Word, Power Point, Visio). The currently available application softwares (Open Office, Dia) do not offer similar capability and performance when compared to Microsoft Office.
2. Finding better desktop search engine than current Beagle software
   

Summary
Windows XP and its application can run faster on top of Linux using VirtualBox, because we could use a very light Windows XP images without any anti virus overhead, and also using a better virtual memory implementation in Linux that minimize disk swapping.