Compared to the standalone EaaS on my laptop I have two major points about my experience this afternoon from Australia using the hosted service:
- I really miss being able to pick a QEMU profile like a 90s PC, or a 2000s PC or a XP profile and start from scratch with the bootable OS. This would have fixed my issue this afternoon where I have somehow managed to accidentally and seemingly irreversibly screw up the Windows 98 SE Base V2 environment in the National Archives of Australia’s node. I can’t find another clean version of it elsewhere, they all seem to have some other software installed. So maybe we sorta need a “read only” bank of these base environment Operating systems, that we can copy to our node, but not install to. I now have a 98 SE Base with an ISO stuck saved in the D: Drive and that blocks accessing any other ISO.
2.There also seems to be missing the ability to edit the environment and revert to an earlier version, but maybe that can’t be done when you have created a new environment, and then somehow by accident deleted the original base environment.
- As @Cynde_Moya has identified, the lag in the mouse makes using this version really difficult and it is easy to click in the wrong place and screw it up. I understand though that this is more to do with my internet speed and ping, but even with a 50mbps connection witth an 8ms ping to sydney from canberra, which is quick, it is still slow enough to be annoying. A locally hosted node in Australia on an Australian cloud provider would likely fix the issue.
Granted, I have only had an afternoon with this and one major positive is I have tried some of the Mac environments, and this is a massive improvement in being able to access them.
Still, hats off to you all. I still see the potential this has.
Tim Mifsud
National Archives of Australia