VMWare

Kevin Buettner wrote:
>
> 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.

Only 512 MB, however the way I set up my disks initially caused multiple
configurations coexisting on /boot some headaches installing. It was
generally fine with for a single version of the OS, but...

I'll try installing it again.

> 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.

Well, I stand corrected. They do have version 3.0 out for Linux. I
wish I could find the page that gave the specifics that left the
impression that it did not. My apologies for the misinformation.

> 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.

no, I typically do not do gaming. However I do cross platform code
development and bought the thing to bounce back and forth and
recompile/test, etc. my Qt interfaces... I do however run some modeling
programs which only run on Win* and I have some specialized sound stuff
which I have found no equivalent yet. The sound on the SMP machine kept
bouncing back and forth between the two processors.

> 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.

Now that I've just upgraded the OS and reconfigured the disk topology
I'll take another look to see if I can get it all working. I'll report
back on what I find with the current stuff. It would be a god send to
get ANYTHING working so that I do not have to play either the reboot or
office-chair shuffle...

As a note, wine seems to buggy still, and I'll also have a look at
win4linux as someone suggested.


EBo --