Linux Rocks – Again!

Of course I have known for years that Linux rocks which is why I use it exclusively. But today I experienced a really amazing example of that. Yet another one. I think this one deserves sharing as it is a perfect illustration of how much more advanced Linux is over other personal computer operating systems.

Running out of Disk Space in VirtualBox

Yesterday was the first day of release for the new Fedora 11 distribution. I always like to run new distributions in a VirtualBox virtual machine for a few days or weeks to ensure that I will not run into any devastating problems when I start installing it on my production machines.

This morning I started installing Fedora 11 in a new virtual machine on my primary workstation, thinking I had enough disk space allocated to the filesystem in which it was being installed. I did not. About a third of the way through the installation I ran out of space on that filesystem. Fortunately VirtualBox is great software itself. It detected the out of space condition and paused the virtual machine and even displayed an error message indicating the exact cause of the problem.

Adding Disk Space on the Fly

Since most modern distributions use LVM, Logical Volume Management, and I had some free space available on the hard drive, I was able to assign additional disk space to the appropriate filesystem on the fly. This means that I did not have to reformat the entire hard drive and reinstall the operating system or even reboot. I simply assigned some of the available space to the appropriate logical volume and resized the filesystem — all while the filesystem was on-line and the running program, VirtualBox was using the filesystem and waiting. I resumed running the virtual machine and the installation continued as if nothing had occurred.

Ease the Pain

Although this type of problem may never have happened to you, running out of disk space while a critical program is running has happened to many people. And while many programs, especially Windows programs, are not as well written and resilient as VirtualBox, Linux made it possible to recover without losing any data and without having to restart the time-consuming installation. How much pain would that cause?

Well-written Open Source operating systems and software are resilient and flexible. They offer significant advantages over many proprietary equivalents. And it is not necessary to reboot just to keep them working, let alone add new disk space.

Contact us at Millennium Technology Consulting LLC to see how Open Source Software can ease your pain. We can also provide training to assist in making the transition. We do Open Source and Linux consulting for small to medium businesses.