linux, windows and vmware

[Doug Sutherland]

It's not very difficult to get vmware working, I just did
an install a short while ago. Install the free vmware
server then install a client and the management tool.
They are all installed by script. This is a bit of a bear
to get working on slackware though, for this distro
you need to set up a fake system v init dir tree or the
setup won't run (totally lame install script!), install
pam because vmware wants it and slack doesn't have
it, and I had to change one of the config files related
to pam, but oh well it's slack, I still love my slack lol

One thing I wanted to mention though, I used to run
the old vmware workstation 5 on windows and install
linux on vmware, it worked excellent, performance
was good, even with only 512mb ram in the system.

However, this time I used the new free vmware
server and client setup installed on linux and put
windows on the vmware, it was horribly slow, it
was not usable for my needs. I really don't know
if it's because windows is on vmware (instead of
linux on vmware) or if the new free product just
doesn't perform as well as workstation 5 did.

I just upgraded to 1GB ram so I'll try vmware
again and see if it performs better. The audio
support is horrible on vmware server/client, in
fact its not really supported, and there is only
ONE audio driver, hopefully it works for you, on
my system it works, sort of, sometimes I get
pauses in audio. If I'm not mistaken I think the
vmware server sends audio over a local network
to client, and it's not doing that very well.

If you're going to play with vmware and linux,
set aside lots of time for it, and expect that you
will do some head scratching. It's not difficult
but some things are strange, like it has SCSI
drivers that emulate IDE and there are many
different ways to configure vmware.

The excellent way is setting it up so that you
can either boot directly into each operating
system or run inside a vm. There is a way to
install it this way, by giving the VM access to
the entire disk. There are documents on the
vmware site on how to do this. This way you
have the convenience of booting the guest OS
in a window, or if you need better performance
or true hardware, boot directly into the guest
OS without the VM. I've done it before and
it worked very well.

I may actually buy a newer version of vmware
workstation because I like it much better. It
is one peice of software than I believe is
worth the money.

  -- Doug