Richard Ibbotson wrote:
> > Second question:  I'm still somewhat tethered to Windoze, in a
> > business sense, so I was wondering if Vmware provided a good
> > enough platform of the MS environment to be used for development,
> 
> I worked on the SuSE stand at the last Linux Expo in London last 
> year.  Myself and a VM Ware employee found that we needed at least 
> 128Mb of RAM and a 500MHz cpu or faster to get it to work at an 
> appreciable speed.

Having used VMWare on quite a few machines, I can say that I *don't*
recommend it for "normal" use unless you have at least 256M RAM.
Anything less, and it slows to a crawl.  In fact, if you have minimal
memory, you might want to seriously check out Win4Lin 3.0 by
Netraverse[1].  I've heard only good things about it.

Where VMWare shines is in testing.  For instance, during most major
KDE releases, I setup a VMWare "computer" for each distribution that
we get binaries for.  I install the distribution with all defaults and
then figure out what it takes to install KDE.  That way, when somebody
emails a question (and they always do... scores every day), I will
have a better idea on what they are talking about (now that I use only
SuSE day-to-day).  I keep the VMWare seesions on non-persistent so
when I shut it down, all of my changes just go away leaving me with a
fresh slate the next time I want to do something.  It's *very* handy!

VMWare is also handy for Windows software testing.  My wife had to do
some Windows programming a few months ago and the installer program we
had was a bit flakey.  Rather than hose up our "normal" Windows
machine, we just created a default one in VMWare.  Then, she could
experiment to her heart's content without worrying about screwing up
anything else.

[1] http://www.netraverse.com
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop