Gerry & Mike,

> Oh yeah, I've got plenty of time spent messing with this software
> package, under different operating systems.  I tried running it in
> windows 2000 having a virtual linux system, and running it under KDE on
> Suse 7.1 with a virtual windows 2000 system.  In my opinion, if you
> don't have *atleast* 700 or so megs of ram, you start swapping big
> time.  I did this all on my laptop with 320 megs of ram, and it worked
> both ways.  However, if you plan on running a linux box with windows
> 2000 as a virtual OS, a few things you need to know first:

I have a lot of experience with VMware and for a technical person it is
a very good product.  If you have a clueless user or a fat-fingered user
then VMWare is not a good choice.

The target market was initially programmers.

> 1) Windows 2000 uses what's called a "hardware abstraction layer", which
> is some fancy term for what they use to determine what your hardware
> is.  I found out the hard way, that if you already have your disk
> partitioned up with linux on one, and windows on the other, you will
> still be required to REINSTALL windows 2k inside the virtual machine
> running on linux.  

You could use Norton/Symantec Ghost to move the Windows OS into the virtual
machine and back out.  I have done this and it works fine both ways.  
Ghost never knows that it's not an actual physical PC that it's running on.

> 2) Every time you boot up windows normally (outside the virtual
> machine), windows tries to "find" your new hardware, like USB and stuff
> if I remember correctly.  

This is only a problem if you run Windows outside the VMWare virtual
machine.  I like to have Linux running all the time on my system and
then run VMWare in the window.  So far I've never been tempted to run
Windows NT on the native machine.

I guess if I played games I might be more interested in this.

> This actually worked a lot smoother for me when I installed linux inside
> a virtual machine - it wasn't picky, and didn't care if I booted up
> inside the virtual machine or not.  Yeah, some startup services would
> fail inside the virtual machine, but nothing that made me answer a bunch
> of M$ pop up windows about new hardware :)  

> All in all, I'd say it's a pretty sweet trick, but it will be a little
> sluggish if you don't have a fast processor and lots of ram.  

I use VMware on systems with no less than 512MB of RAM.  Actually my laptop
has 256MB of RAM and I use VMWare for Linux with Windows NT in the VM but
it is quite slow to start up.  (I allocated 96MB of RAM to Windows.)

I have only had VMware crash once in 2+ years of using it.  I don't know
what the cause of the crash was but everything else seemed to be fine.  I
had to reboot the system though to get VMware to work again because the
process wouldn't die and could not be killed.

-- 
Jim Ockers - Pason (ockers@pason.com)
Contact info:  http://www.pason.com/ockers.html

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