It’s also happy to work with several accounts and I can even choose to sync Calender, Address Book or email on each account – in this area, it does exactly what I want.

Staying with Google, it also has a chat client for the google talk, this is slightly less flexible, being linked to your first email account, but still working well out of the box with no need for an extra app to be installed.

As my phone is on the Three Network, it also has a Skype app, that gives access to Three’s Free Skype calling, this used the internet to set up the calls, but the calls themselves are made over the regular mobile channels – and after hours and hours of talking to people on skype using the Galaxy Portal, I’d keep the phone just for that.

Three do limit the Skype use to calls between other Skype users, so none of the Skype to Landline or Landline to Skype services will work, but you can’t blame them for protecting their core business.

Things I don’t Like so much, include…

Not Having a Keyboard, I’m getting used to the onscreen keyboard, but it still isn’t accurate enough for me, I still have a Nokia E63 on another account, for texting, and couldn’t think of sending too many texts or typing emails using the on screen keys. When used horizontally,  things are much better, but I still have a problem of accidentally touching the screen between keys – probably a a because I’m still using an E63 with its keyboard for some things. My next Android Phone is definitely going to have a keyboard.

Not Having a visible Alert – I’ve been spoiled by the flashing keyboard led on the Nokia E63! A glance at that phone will tell me if I’ve missed a call, or a text/email has arrived. Not this phone, if i miss an Audible Alert, I’m not going to know about it until I’ve woken the screen up to check.

I’m Getting used to the shorter battery life (compared to the Nokia E63), and this phone seems better than most – with my use, lots of email checking and a few calls each day, I can often go a couple of days without recharging.

Overall, given that my main uses for the device are phone, email, text and skype calling, it scores big on the skype and email handling, but i really miss a keyboard.

Both the hardware I’m using and the Internet Services available.

When I first looked at using the sweex router for hardware control, access to the router from the Internet meant opening a port on your router, and running a web server.

But today, it is possible to use a chat server somewhere on the Internet to make the link between you and your devices – or your devices and each other!

There is also Openfire a Java Chat / Jabber server that will run on just about any server you can install a Java SDK on.  Run this at one site (opening the necessary firewall ports), and you can have two way communication with hardware at any other net connected site.

As Soon as I get the time, I’ll be writing up how to flash the router from scratch with stock openwrt midge  and control its i/o ports using a Jabber / Chat client on an Android Phone.

After upgrading the RAM to 512Mb, I tried to get several versions of linux – including the latest Ubuntu – to install, each time, the X server failed to run and once booted, the Imac refused to access the built in cdrom leaving me to continue the install from an external usb drive.

Then I tried a debian iso from http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r5/powerpc/iso-cd/, I used :- http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r5/powerpc/iso-cd/debian-40r5-powerpc-xfce-CD-1.iso

Hopefully, the xfce environment will suit the lower power of the old G3 platform.

As the installer ran, it recognised and continued to use the internal cdrom – it also saw the firewire as a possible network – full marks!!

Since then, I’ve mostly been using it as a spare terminal to access the openvz server – with both ssh and vnc clients.  its quite up to the task although in terms of speed, even the eeepc beats it!

I also have the pulseaudio package on it – allowing it to become the sound output for any linux system – virtual or physical – that also runs the pulse audio system.

Its happy to play mp3 files stored locally on its hard drive using Rhythmbox.

It boots quite quickly, so I keep it to one side of the desk for those times when I need an extra terminal.

As explained in an earlier post, rather than mess with the EeePC setup, I  ‘mount -bind’ the /dev and /proc folders of a linux root system sitting in an external drive ( a portable hard drive being faster by a mile than a usb memory stick).

This allows me to take several systems with me when working away (or simply on holiday).  I have a copy of the ‘general desktop’ I use day to day, the php & mysql system I tinker with and an OpenWrt buildroot system for the router.  These all live in folders under the /vz folder of the hard drive.

I have tinkered with the system for a while now and it is quite a simple matter to press “Ctrl-Alt-T” on the EeePC to get a terminal, “sudo su -” to get to the root shell, I don’t even have to type the “mount –bind” or “choot” commands in, a couple of presses on the up arrow and they are there in the command history.

At home, the system works fine, I turn off the wireless, run the gsm script and access the web.  With the 3G locally, I get between fast ISDN and early (512k) broadband speeds – not always good enough for Skype, but for general web browsing, emails and updating a blog, good enough.

However, last week, when we got to our destination (North Devon), I found that the phone only had a gsm connection – that starts at 9.6k.  Downloading voicemail messages emailed from the office took about 5 min per minute of message!  I got to keep up with the emails, but not much else.

The problem that stopped me dead in my tracks however, was that some websites (the bank, google adsense etc.)would refuse to completely load.  All of the sites that failed were https sites.  I keep shortcuts and login details stored within the “general desktop” system.  These sites seemed to be loading up to the part of the page where the login details would show.

The slow connection had me thinking that the browser must be giving up before the page was delivered, or perhaps it was something to do with the gsm modem service.

When I got back, I set the system back up and tried both the wifi/broadband link and the 3g modem connection.  Sure enough, when accessing the sites through the 3g phone, the same secure passworded pages failed.  Accessing those same sites via the Wifi/Broadband everything was fine.  Being back at the office, and with a faster connection, and copies on hand, I was able to try a few things out.

Re-naming the .mozilla folder caused the browser to ‘forget everything’ and I could once again access the sites.  Swapping back to the regular .mozilla folder, I dug a little deeper.

Deleting temp files made no difference (I had tried that whilst away), deleting the mozilla cookie files revealed them to be the problem!  Now some of the sites I need store part of the account details within cookies, so I guess I’ll have to make a few notes before setting off next time, as it seems that some site/cookies hold info about the connection you logged in with.

So, if you have any trouble accessing a passworded site and you are plumbed in to a different connection, try deleting or renaming the cookie files within the .mozilla/firefox folder.

With access to some sites, impossible and others slow, I was not able to do to much with the EeePC/Hard Drive combo this trip.  The system however, as a means of keeping several working environments accessable from the EeePC (or any other linux laptop) is – in my book – a winner!  The Hard drive (or memory stick if you favour battery operation over speed) can be carried away from the laptop, if that gets lost, none of your work or passwords are on the internal drive.

Usually, a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is offered by web hosting companies to their customers as an alternative to virtual hosting (where they can upload web pages and applications, but not configure the server software) and Dedicated Hosting (Where they get – and pay for – an entire server that they can specify and manage themselves).  Like Virtual Machines on a Workstation, a VPS on a server allows the hosting supplier to slice up one big server into many smaller servers, each with their own operating system, RAM and Hard Disk space.

Now, on one of these hosted VPS machines, you get enough resources to run a few web services accross one or more domains – depending on your budget.  The operating systems are pre-installed with the minimum software required, its up to you to add more – but its best to stick with the minimum you need for reasons of performance and security.

Move that same VPS system onto your own server connected to your workstation with a 100Mb network behind a properly setup router/fire wall and things are very different.

You can slice up your server however you need, I’m using a recent single core machine with 3 Gb RAM and a couple of 80 Gb SATA Hard Drives raided together.  At the moment, a 110Gb Drive is also sitting on the IDE connector.  It currently has seven containers running, the smallest has 900Mb ram and 6Gb of Hard Drive Space and is a bit of an overkill running DNS to the rest of the network as it does.

The Largest has 3Gb RAM, 26Gb of Main Hard Disk and exclusive access to the 110Gb IDE drive.  This is my ‘Desktop’ system.  It runs VNCServer, creating a virtual desktop that I can log into from wherever I happen to be sitting, an Ubuntu 8 Server operating system with the addition of XFCE desktop (compiled from source rather than the Ubuntu packages), Firefox web browsing, Gftp, Thunderbird for email, Open Office for general documents, PDF Viewer etc.  Also running in this container is Samba, so that I can share any files with the windows machines I now use to access the system.

In order to run server software like Samba, that requires a little more access to the networ card than usual, the OpenVZ vethN device is used, this requires that a script is run on the server after the container has started.  As I don’t often need to restart the server or the desktop container very often, I run this from a SSH login.

Regular server software such as Apache, sshd and even VNC Server are quite happy with the regular ‘venetX’ devices that start whenever a container is started.

The VPS Software running all this is OpenVZ.  It has command line tools for creating and modifying  ’containers’ and there are several templates for various distributions of linux, or you can create your own.

On top of this, there is a great browser based tool for managing the server, VTONF is GPL software from a hosting company called Bobcares.  It allows you to completely run the VPS Server using a browser, creating, starting, stopping and modifying containers at the click of a button.

So, How is this any better than a Virtual Machine running on a server?

Well, as the only software running as some version or other of Linux, OpenVZ is able to keep all of the container file spaces under a single directory “/vz” on the main system.  To inspect or retrieve some files, from a container, you just need to navigate to the relevant directory under “/vz”.

If a container is going to need more space that you planned for, VTONF (or a shell command) will allow you to increase it.  Ditto for memory.

Unlike a VPS up at a web host, your VPS Server can be asked to map any physical device ( in the ‘/dev’ directory) can be mapped to a container.

I recently found another advantage.  As the file system inside an OpenVZ container is simply a complete linux system root, should you need to use it on another linux system, it can be copied to a drive or memory stick and then, it is just a matter of ‘mount -bind’ing then ‘/dev’ and ‘/proc’ directories before chrooting into the container root.

I did this with an EeePC and the Container I use to do a bit of PHP developement.  A couple of changes in the container’s ‘/etc’ folder – to deal with the different network settings – and I was able to start the container’s apache webserver and log into the content management system using the EeePC web browser pointed at “http://localhost” .

If you have only one large machine, thats pretty much it, you can create virtual machines inside it, give them their own RAM, Hard Disk space and Network connections and if your system has enough memory and cpu speed, run several of them at a time.

Backing up any of these Virtual Systems is simply a question of copying the folder they live in onto an external disk or tape system.

For me, an extra benefit is portability, if your system fails, you can take your copies (you did make them didn’t you?) to another machine, install the VMWare software, and you are back up and running!  Going off on the road for a while, copy the virtual machines to the laptop and your computing environment goes with you (although for security, a pocket hard drive might be a better place to keep all those files).

The recent versions of windows spoilt all of this by keying the running system to the hardware, not a problem, you would think, VMWare virtualises most of the hardware, but the processor type is actually passed through to the virtual machine.  If your running Intel hardware, your virtual machines will see an Intel Processor – very similar to the physical processor on the mother board.  If you are running an AMD system, then that is what the virtual machines will see.

For upgraders, XP used to allow several changes to the main hardware components per year before complaining and requiring the system be re-registered, possibly over the phone.

Because of this, for a really portable Virtual Machine that you could take from one system to another – and then back again if thats what was needed, you need to be running pre Windows XP or Linux.

As I happen to prefer Linux over Windows, this is not really a problem for me.  I need windows software because most of the people I deal with are using it, but my documents, emails, web browsing and developement are all mainly done under Linux.

There are a couple of things that have to be considered when using Virtual Machines accross several different computers:-

First, You have to be able to transfer the Virtual Hard Drives between sytems.  If you might need to do it using a network or the first portable drive you have with space on it, then you need to get VMWare to create the Virtual Drives in 2Gb segments – there is a Tickbox for this in VMWare Workstation & VMWare Server.

If you are using a third party tool to create blank images for VMWare Player, then its worth checking for the option.

Although splitting the drive into 2Gb segments may cause a slight drop performance, you are more likely to be able to transfer the resulting files using whatever network or portable drive you have to hand.

Second, when you power up the virtual machine, the host computer will need a good chunk of ram plus any ram you dedicate to the virtual system in its .ini file.  To avoid having to change these settings in order to start your virtual machine, it is better to give them enough RAM to get the job done comfortably than max them out because on your main machine you can.  If you have plenty of RAM, you can always run several machines at the same time!

The only problem I have with Virtual Machines is the way that their hard drives are contained.  This is the only way to do it when mixing different systems (Linux/Windows), each Virtual Drive can be formatted as FAT, NTFS, EXT2, whatever, but this does mean that it is not easy to drag out the files from a Virtual Machine that has been broken, you have to add the  Virtual Drive to another Virtual Machine and use that to copy the files.

Also, it is not easy (using VMWare Workstation/Player) to alter the size of the drives.  I used to find that I had several large Virtual Machines/Drives taking up all of the space on my system.  Quite often, I’d start working with a new software build only to find that I had under estimated the space needed.

Of course, the problem is caused by my reluctance to delete old copies (you won’t know you need it until you delete it!) and the way that VMWare (or other Virtual Machine Software) can copy a template Linux or Windows system leaving you to alter a few network settings before starting a new project.

I have recently found an answer – for Linux environments that don’t need high speed graphics,  a VPS Server.