Update on VMs under Linux?

[Kurt Granroth]

vodhner at cox.net wrote:
> Tired of dual booting.  How hard is it, nowadays, to do the following:
> 
> 1. Run XP in some sort of emulation or virtual machine under Linux, for light use (mostly MS Word 97).
> 
> 2. Have it able to access *existing* NTFS and FAT32 volumes on the same box without much finagling?  I've got a fair amount of resources that I use from both Linux and Windows.
> 
> 3. Have other VMs for use on occasion to tinker with alternative Linux distros?  And have them able to access my main Linux / FAT32 / NTFS files?

Almost trivial on all points.  If you get the free (as in cost, not
freedom) VMWare Server or Player, you could even run your existing
Windows in an emulated session.  I'm doing that right now on one of my
newer boxes.  Basically, as long as I turn off automatic updates and
only do the updates in one session (either emulated OR physical), then
I'm fine.

The advantage of that approach vs having a disk image is mostly related
to speed.  Physical drives are marginally faster than disk images.
Also, if you have substantial software already installed, you won't have
to reinstall it.

If you want access to NTFS and FAT32 volumes outside of VMWare, then it
sort of depends.  You can have full read-write access to all FAT volumes
on any and all Linux distros.  Read access to NTFS is also available on
all distros.  Write access to NTFS is another story.  AFAIK, the only
distro that has it "installed" is Gentoo and that's only because you can
install whatever the heck you want as the "base".  Under SUSE or all
other distros, you'll have to get the NTFS-3G package which should allow
you full access.  YMMV.  It's better to NOT use NTFS for shared storage.

You can also give any VM Linux image access to your host files via
several methods.  The easiest is to set up an NFS share on the shared
drives and just mount them in the emulated image.  If you can guarantee
single access to the drive, then you can even setup VMWare to directly
access the disk at a raw level.  Don't try it with a drive that's
mounted on both your Host and your Image, though.

> I am willing to pay some money for software to avoid having another box.
> 
> I have a 1.3 GHz Athlon cpu and 0.5 GB of memory.  I'm not too particular about performance, especially on the Windows side.

The CPU is fine but the memory might cause you some grief.  I would
strongly recommend at least 1.0 GB if you want to run a VM.  Most VMs
are unusable at less than 256 M and you will be seriously hurting for
space at that level.

> I'm also interested in possible virtual solutions at work, to allow isolated instances inside a single Linux box for tinkering.  Would be cool to run Solaris 10 under Linux too, since our production shop is mostly Solaris 10.  Once again, VM performance would not be an issue for this purpose.

Absolutely.  We run VMWare extensively at work with multiple VMs running
at a time.  It's an indispensable part of our workflow now and we can't
imagine development without them.

Kurt