Usermode Linux

["Flood Randy Capt AFCA/TCAA" <randy.flood@scott.af.mil>]

Here's an interesting article on something called "usermode Linux".  

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/29/UserModeLinux.html

From the site at sourceforge (
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/index.html )
 
"User-Mode Linux is a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and
Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels
or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without
risking your main Linux setup. 
User-Mode Linux gives you a virtual machine that may have more hardware
and software virtual resources than your actual, physical computer. Disk
storage for the virtual machine is entirely contained inside a single
file on your physical machine. You can assign your virtual machine only
the hardware access you want it to have. With properly limited access,
nothing you do on the virtual machine can change or damage your real
computer, or its software." 

What could you do with user-mode Linux?

-Well, let's say that you want to get into KDE development (or gnome, if
you prefer), but you want to make sure that you don't mess up your
machine.  You could run the CVS version of KDE inside a virtual machine.
Then, you could use xnest to have a window that contained the virtual
machine's desktop using the CVS version of KDE.  Here's a screenshot of
someone running multiple virtual machines and using xnest to acess the
X-server that is running on one of the virtual machines
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/net.html .

-What could you do that you might want to actually do?  

Well, you could run one distribution of Linux as your main distribution,
but then install another distribution in a virtual machine.  Or, if you
had a fast machine, you could set up virtual machines in order to do
webhosting.  You could give each customer their own virtual  machine.

Or, you could play with recovering with system disasters.  In the
article, it focuses on this.  

This is something I'd like to play with, but I probably won't have the
time to do it for a long time.  Has anyone ever used this?

Randy
   

  




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