Eli the Computer Guy

Archive for the ‘Virtualization’ Category

Most people do not realize the HUGE amount of emails that are in their Deleted Items Folder in Outlook.  For some reason many people refuse to empty out their Deleted Items Folder.  I’ve even seen some people actually use Deleted Items as a way of sorting their email.

The problem is that the Deleted Items Folder can be absolutely MASSIVE.  I have seen users Deleted Items Folders over 5 GB in size.  Most users do not realize that this effects their Outlook.  All of the data is still kept in the local .pst file and ends up slowing down Outlook and can cause the file to become corrupted.  Additionally when the user migrates to a new computer, or their old one crashes and they need a data recovery, transferring these Deleted Items can take a significant amount of time.

If they decide to migrate their email to Hosted Exchange not only can it take a ridiculous amount of time to upload all of their Deleted Items, but they will also end up paying for storage space just to store worthless email.

Do yourself a favor and regularly empty your Deleted Items Folder.  It seems like a little thing, but not doing it can create a large problem.

Turnkey Linux has created a number of ready to go Linux appliance distributions.  These appliances are based on Ubuntu.  You just download the .iso, install it and you’re up and running.

They have standard LAMP, Drupal and WordPress appliances.  They also have downloads for:

• AppEngine
• Tomcat
• WordPress
• phpBB
• LAMP
• Rails
• Joomla
• MediaWiki
• Drupal 6
• Drupal 5
• LAPP
• Django
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Core
• Bootstrap

I have not used them yet, but they seem as if they are well done.

You can check them out at http://www.turnkeylinux.org/appliances .

VirtualBox by Sun Microsystems is a fabulous piece of computer virtualization software.  It is easy to install and use, and there are both paid and free versions of the product.

I like VirtualBox better then Microsoft Virtual PC because Virtual PC has a lot of problems with Linux operating systems. (I had a hell of a time trying to get Red Hat to work in Virtual PC) I have installed Windows and Linux Operating Systems on VirtualBox with no problems what so ever.

They have installer packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.  If you have ever used virtualization software before you can have a new virtual computer up and running in only a little longer then the operating system installation time once the software has downloaded.  If you are new to Virtual Computers it will still take you less then an hour to figure out what is going on.

If you are looking to play with and use virtual computers and don’t want to pay for VMWare or deal with Microsoft, VirtualBox does the job well.  Check it out at http://www.virtualbox.org/