[plug] Windows and Linux

[Colin Muller]

Michael De Santis wrote:
> I would like to hear from anyone who has installed linux on a window
> 98/2000 machine using VMware.
> 
> Reason - Looking for a solution for a sales people who use windows on
> their laptops but required to demo products that run on Linux. Normally
> I would recommend installing windows on a linux machine (using VMware)
> but the sales people are not computer savvy.

Since they have to demo Linux products, they'll need to learn something
about it, so why not? They'll still be able to use Windows in the VM for
anything they want. I've just installed Win98 in VMWare under a Linux
host (to be precise, I've started booting an existing Win98 install on
my HD under VMWare for Linux) and it works like a treat - plenty fast
enough for my purposes on my Celeron 366, 160MB RAM ThinkPad with 64 MB
given over to the Win98 VM.  They don't need to learn much Linux to run
VMWare - and they'll have a host OS which handles suspend perfectly, so
they'll never need to re-boot and log in. I'd give them 256MB RAM and
split it half-half Linux/VMWare.

Re: someone else's (Brett's?) comments about VMWare's slowness - It was
very slow at first, but that chamged dramatically once I'd installed the
(no extra cost) VMWare Tools for Windows - they provide a virtual SVGA
monitor which runs at a perfectly acceptable speed - better at
full-screen, but acceptably in a window (switching between the two modes
is just a three-key trick). It does use plenty of CPU cycles, though
(I'm getting 25% at rest) - and Windows boots and shuts down veeery
slowly in the VM.

One small useful tidbit: to my amazement, once the VMWare Tools have
been installed, you can cut and paste (plain text, haven't tried
anything else) inter-OS.

I'll be stumping up the money for VMWare - it's not cheap, but it beats
re-booting or rushing over to another machine to check on Web page
usability; I'm also looking forward to cross-platform Perl testing etc.

Colin