An audience of two

Friday August 18, 2006

BrandZ: Two for the price of none

It's not often that I get the urge to blog something positive. I mean, by nature I'm a fairly cynical bugger. But yesterday I discovered something so unbelievably "wicked cool" as the locals say that I just had to say something.

Right now I've got a Linux system on my desktop. It's running CentOS, which is free. (Free as in beer, not as in regime change.) But what's so amazing is that it's running in its own zone on my AMD box which is in turn running Solaris. Which is also free, or at least it can be if you want it to be.

I was amazed how easy it was to set up. I was understandably nervous about trashing my system so first off I took a flash archive of my existing setup (cheers Ben). Then (and this was the trickiest bit) I set up a seperate machine as a boot server (PXE is a bitch when you're used to the Open Boot Prom) so that I could install the latest Nevada build and then go back to my old setup if I wanted to without hunting around for a boot DVD.

I wanted to re-install the box anyway as when I originally set it up I created a Windows partition so that the system could be dual-bootable. But since I've never had the urge or need to boot it in Windows mode I figured I may as well just reclaim the space. Installing Nevada was a doddle; the only downside is that I was running in dual screen mode and I've forgotten what I did to get that to work.

So then I came to install the Linux zone. I've played with zones before - they are an incredibly useful way to test installation of software since you can just trash a zone and rebuild it in a few minutes - so I already understood that part of the process. Installing BrandZ was a bit more worrying as it involves BFU and I don't like BFU, but the instructions are very clear and it all went smoothly.

So now I've got one free OS running inside of another free OS. How cool is that?