Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 21st Mar 2007 16:40 UTC, submitted by anonymous
Virtualization of operating systems used to be slow and hard to use. Advances such as the KQemu accelerator, VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen and of course the recent integration of KVM virtualization into the Linux kernel have helped out a lot though, especially on the server side, but for a normal user, virtualization could be somewhat clunky. Mac users have been able to run their Windows applications like this using Parallels Coherence, yet now other *nix users can too. Ordinary desktop or business users who require applications from another operating system can benefit from a seamless desktop.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Very, very cool thing. However, I fear that a casual user would meet another stumbling block.
Basically: if I want to open an Office document in seamless mode with MS Office, how do I load from/save on my /home directory by default? How do I seamlessly share files between the VM and the host?
Don't get me wrong -I know that you can share data by using, for example, SMB, or an USB drive (with vmware at least, last time I checked USB support in qemu was quite rudimental). But this is not great for seamless usability (that is, if I want to do such a setup for my parents trying to bundle the windows applications they use more/need more, this wouldn't work well).
Is it possible to build some kind of Windows script that automagically makes of "Documents and settings" a symlink to host /home (connected by SMB)?
In the loosely related case of rdesktop deployment on some organization (I think it would make much sense to have a single Windows box and license to run needed Windows apps that everyone can connect to), it is possible to have a client/server thing that automatically assigns the Documents and Settings to the home of the user connecting? I think yes, I'd like to know if someone did it.