VMWare

[Kevin Buettner]

On Jan 29,  1:06am, John (EBo) David wrote:
> Subject: Re: VMWare
> Victor Odhner wrote:
> > 
> > I find myself with a 1.3GHz processor and 256MB of memory.
> > This is a dual-boot box, running Win98 or RedHat 7.1
> > depending on my mood (and needs of other family members).
> > 
> > So:  Is it time for me to get VMWare, so that I can
> > run Linux all the time and Windows on top of it as
> > needed?
> 
> well...  I bought a copy nearly two years ago and I have been having
> trouble running it off and on every since.

My experiences have been quite the opposite of yours.  I've been running
it for around three years now and have been quite pleased.  Recently, I
upgraded to their latest workstation offering.

> They do not (at least last time I checked) support the advanced kernel
> features.  When I upgraded from SuSE 6.1 to 7.1 VMWare upchucked big
> time and has refused to recompile the drivers ever since -- problem
> 64-bit kernel mode not supported.

How much memory do you have?  It's true (according to their web page)
that they don't support PAE mode, but you don't need a kernel with
PAE enabled unless you have more than 4GB of physical memory.

> They also have never gotten the SMP
> stuff to work well enough to keep half the resources from thrashing.

I have never seen this problem.  I've been running vmware on
a dual processor machine with 1GB of memory and it's working quite
well.  Prior to that, for about two years, I ran vmware on a dual
processor machine with only 384 MB of memory, also without problems.

> Check their web site, I am under the impression that their newest
> version will not run native on Linux, but will support it as a guest
> OS.  At least that was my understanding when I looked it back up last
> week to see if they had an upgrade to the drivers.

Which version are you looking at?  I just took a look at their website
and their most recent workstation product does run Linux as either the
host or the guest.  Their low(er) end server product does too.  Their
high end server product doesn't run on *either* Windows or Linux. 
Instead, they have their own OS.

> All in all VMWare looks impressive -- until you start to use the thing
> seriously.  Your mileage may vary, particularly if you are running a
> single processor machine and do not even try to push the envelope.

As I said earlier, I've been running their workstation product on a
dual processor machine without any difficulties whatsoever.  As for
pushing the envelope, I guess it depends upon what you mean by that. 
I'm not running PAE mode enabled kernels.  Also, the Windows
applications that I run are not graphics intensive.  As Bob George
pointed out, if you're into serious Windows gaming, vmware won't be a
good choice.  For the original poster's purposes though, it may be the
perfect solution to avoid booting back into Windows to run those Windows
applications which don't yet have good counterparts on Linux.

Wine (from CodeWeavers) might also be worth a try.  I gave it a
try yesterday on one of the applications that I care about and was
surprised to find that it mostly works.  On another application
though, the install went okay, but when I tried to run the installed
ap, it seemed to get hung in some sort of tight loop -- top showed
it consuming all of the CPU.

Kevin