Well, there is a thing in Konfabulator called "Konsposé" or what - basically "another desktop", where only your widgets live.
This means you can configure widgets to live only in Konsposé-space - no screen real estate used by them in normal view, then you hit F8 and now you see only your widgets. F8 again, and you are back to your desktop. Why is this good? Now, I've got at the moment a big digital clock, CPU/MEM usage gauges, a calendar, a todo list, a gmail inbox checker, a desktop wallpaper chooser and an animated hula-hula girl configured Konsposé-only. Far easier to use than a customized Firefox - at least for me. Have been happily using it now for months.
So, at least access easiness-wise, Konfabulator can be far better than some overconfig'ed Firefox (imho, certainly). And it's sort of nicey. And I've got a hula-hula girl. And no freakin' two clicks and alt-tabbing, just one hit on F8 (ok, two to switch back also).
This page http://www.ece.tamu.edu/People/bios/bkish.html says he is Hungarian. (Or at least got his degree and doctorate in Hungary. Whith this name it makes him more than likely a fellow hungarian.)
Uhm, recently I've done some googling and asking around about some specific VMWare issues in conjuction with a project at the uni (how 'online' the control of resource caps in ESX Server is, whatever) and it seemed to be really hard to find people with useful knowledge / useful articles on nonfunctional properties of VMWare. Just a random thought, but if you are planning VMWare-based server consolidation at your company maybe you should ask VMWare if they can help you out with some figures to convince management:) (And as a sidenote, VMWare has a server migration tool, too for the disk image -> VMWare image case, so you may be able to bake up an in-house benchmark quite painlessly.)
There is allot of crap, mostly Windows stuff, that I run on solo servers
You mentioned Xen as an alternative - isn't Xen welded-kernel-in-the-guest stuff? So what about Windows?:) Anyway, in my limited experience no virtualization (or para-virtualization) solution comes even near to VMWare, if one takes every aspect into account (management tools, ease of use, stability, management through web service calls, etc.) - in general.
If the Windows stuff is a bunch of generally low-resource consumption servers, then you are on safe ground - it's one server humming away at minimal resource consumption instead of n servers doing the same (done it for research purposes, works like a charm - resource brokerage seems to be pretty advanced under the hood). Obviously, care should be taken when migrating production servers under considerable load to VMWare - a mate of mine had quite some headaches during preparing his master's thesis when he crammed a 10 or so node environment on a 2-CPU xSeries ESX Server and tried to load a bit the web app in question. (It was all IBM-Java-Websphere-DB2 stuff, so I personally wasn't that surprised:))
If you are _really_ into going after the power issue, there are some pretty nifty research papers about the power consumption in data centers as a function of the individual node resource utilisations. As far as I remember the models tend to be really simple, but, alas, I don't have the papers with me, not into the field generally and I don't think you want to dig _that_ deep:)
Slashdot Mirror
This means you can configure widgets to live only in Konsposé-space - no screen real estate used by them in normal view, then you hit F8 and now you see only your widgets. F8 again, and you are back to your desktop. Why is this good? Now, I've got at the moment a big digital clock, CPU/MEM usage gauges, a calendar, a todo list, a gmail inbox checker, a desktop wallpaper chooser and an animated hula-hula girl configured Konsposé-only. Far easier to use than a customized Firefox - at least for me. Have been happily using it now for months.
So, at least access easiness-wise, Konfabulator can be far better than some overconfig'ed Firefox (imho, certainly). And it's sort of nicey. And I've got a hula-hula girl. And no freakin' two clicks and alt-tabbing, just one hit on F8 (ok, two to switch back also).
Just my 2 cents.
This page http://www.ece.tamu.edu/People/bios/bkish.html says he is Hungarian. (Or at least got his degree and doctorate in Hungary. Whith this name it makes him more than likely a fellow hungarian.)
There is allot of crap, mostly Windows stuff, that I run on solo servers
You mentioned Xen as an alternative - isn't Xen welded-kernel-in-the-guest stuff? So what about Windows? :) Anyway, in my limited experience no virtualization (or para-virtualization) solution comes even near to VMWare, if one takes every aspect into account (management tools, ease of use, stability, management through web service calls, etc.) - in general.
If the Windows stuff is a bunch of generally low-resource consumption servers, then you are on safe ground - it's one server humming away at minimal resource consumption instead of n servers doing the same (done it for research purposes, works like a charm - resource brokerage seems to be pretty advanced under the hood). Obviously, care should be taken when migrating production servers under considerable load to VMWare - a mate of mine had quite some headaches during preparing his master's thesis when he crammed a 10 or so node environment on a 2-CPU xSeries ESX Server and tried to load a bit the web app in question. (It was all IBM-Java-Websphere-DB2 stuff, so I personally wasn't that surprised :))
If you are _really_ into going after the power issue, there are some pretty nifty research papers about the power consumption in data centers as a function of the individual node resource utilisations. As far as I remember the models tend to be really simple, but, alas, I don't have the papers with me, not into the field generally and I don't think you want to dig _that_ deep :)