[CLUE-Tech] VMWare

[Grant Johnson]

The hardware finding has nothing to do with the Windows 2000 hardware 
abstraction layer.  VMWare creates fake hardware, so every time you 
switch from running in the virtual machine (one set of hardware) to 
running on the real hardware, it is a change.  For instance, no matter 
what sound card you really have, under VMWare, it is an SB16.

Running an OS both native and under VM is troublesome, but running only 
one way or the other is fine.  

One thing I use it a lot for:  You can make your disk partitions so that 
they can be rolled back.  I use this for testing windows installer 
programs.  I just pop up the virtual machine on my KDE, it loads and 
runs windows, then I run the installer, mess with the registry, and 
everything.  Then when I shut down, I have the choice of whether to make 
these changes permanent, or ditch them.

My laptop only boots to Linux, but does have Windows under VMWare on it 
for testing things like that and also connections to the Apache web 
server or to the PostgreSQL database from windows.

I have an AMD366 with 96M of memory.  Performance is workable, but not 
good.  Remember to take your system requirements for EACH OS, add them 
together, then add 10% for overhead.

Bummer, but still cheaper than 2 machines, and more versatile.