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
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