EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

We previously covered options for backup and recovery on systems with no CDROM drive. I've since moved my netbook to Windows 7 and have come across a few more options.

The Portable Ubuntu for Windows team has made available an Ubuntu distribution that runs fully inside of Windows using the coLinux kernel. The concept is fascinating, but it does fall down in a few places. First of all, on my Acer Aspire One, it takes a very long time to get started, which is probably fair because it is starting up an entire OS inside of the current one. Also, it seems to use a significant amount of RAM. This causes a lot of swapping on this 1G machine.

I'm getting ready to start a 7 hour challenge from my cousin to write a Elite style game called Ex Astris today. Actually, my version is inspired by Space Trader.

Last night I got the latest version of Ubuntu installed as I did not currently have a development environment set up at home that would allow me to do graphical Linux development.

During the course of debugging a potential memory leak at work I noticed that Linux seems to allocate at least 8M of memory for each thread created.

This very simple test program illustrates the memory allocations: