Doe VmWare defeat the purpose?

[Mal007colm]

I have a program called VmWare which can load several OS's at the same time. One of my favorite screenshots on the homepage show WinNT as a host booting Win95 and Win2k. It says that you can run any Linux as a Virtual Machine or FreeBsd. My question is if I ran Linux or FreeBsd as a VM in Windows would that not be defeating the purpose. I mean would I lose the stability of Linux due to the fact that it was running in a Windows environment? Or if I wanted to avoid this if it is a problem should I install redhat and then run VmWare booting Windows to keep stability. The only problem being that my familiarity with Linux is not very good.

 

[BCYL]

With your situation you can dual-boot linux and windows, and therefore get the best of both worlds...

LILO from RedHat makes this very easy to do... I am sure doing a search of these boards will get you quite a few posts about this issue if you need more help...

I am not trying to be mean, just don't feel like typing everything up and turns out it's not what you want

 

[geoff2k]

I use VmWare at my job, and love it. The convinience of booting multiple OS's from disk images for software testing purposes is amazing (we used to use partition tools and have to reboot constantly, now, a fresh OS image is just a copy command away...)

Under VmWare, the stability of the guest operating system definitely depends on the stability of the host operating system. Since VmWare provides an emulation layer to the guest OS that makes it think it is talking to the hardware, it eventually has to feed those requests back to the "real" drivers on the host OS. If those host OS drivers are buggy and unstable, there isn't much VmWare can do about it.

I guess to answer you question, you'd have to tell us what the purpose of running the Unix-like OS is. Are you planning on running a long-term service (like FTP or WWW) that needs to be up all the time? Or are you just booting it up for casual use to teach yourself all the two letter commands? If the former, you probably don't want to run it as a guest OS. If the latter, VmWare will suit your needs just fine.

 

[Locutus of Board]

VMWARE use for me is:

I have 256 MB of Ram at home, and with the stuff I need, W2K uses a little over 150.

I leave the default 48 MB for Linux.

I get to play with both OSes at the same time, and learn each.

Yes, I can install and dual-boot, but each time I get bored of playing with one or the other takes another reboot.

Just great for me VMWARE rules.

 

[Mal007colm]

Well for now I want to use several versions (Redhat 7, Mandrake 7.1, Caledera EZdesktop 2.4, BEOS and Freebsd)to get familiar with them then later use one version as an FTP server and to control a small home Network.

 

[SUOrangeman]

I have yet to try VMWare, but I find it very interesting and potentially very useful.

I am maintaining all on my *legal* (of course!) downloads on a 45GB drive in my machine at work. I offer that drive as a Windows share, FTP, and HTTP server. As I currently multi-boot 4 OSes just for kicks. But, if I were smart, I would run the FTP/HTTP side of this server from Linux and mebbe leave the Windows sharing to Win2K (I haven't delved into Samba yet). I'll have to do some reseach on getting VMWare to do something like that.

On that same box, the CDRW doesn't like Win2K (I think I had Nero and Adaptec installed simultaneously or something, and it hasn't worked since). Yet, the drive works fine in Win98SE. Again, I could use VMWare to fire up Win98 and burn CDs (not to mention "testing" new software packages I download).

Very cool idea. If only I could spend a month testing and researching on a powerful box that's not my primary.

-SUO