Virtual machine software allows you to run one operating system (and its applications) from within the environment of another. For years the most recognized name in virtual machine software for the x86 architecture has been VMware, whose eponymous industry-leading product supports a wide variety of guest operating systems. Read the review at NewsForge.
Review: VMware 4.5.2
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Nice to see they fixed some of the performace issues.
ebuilds make installation painless
Booting from DVD media is also possible if you enable “legacy emulation.”
Also, a suggestion, run a lightweight window manager such as FluxBox/XFCE/fvwm to decrease overhead and kernel 2.6 to increase interactivity of host applications.
I just installed VMWare 4.5.2 for a client. The only issue seems to be samba printing. Samba file-sharing is a breeze (so I suspect printing setup for Samba on the Linux side is bad). Other than than, it’s a dream. I’ve used Bochs, and Qemu before, and this is much nicer in many ways.
For my client who has just moved to VectorLinux from WinME due to too many viruses and downtime, it’s a dream come true. He can still do screen shots of Windows applications running natively for the class he teaches (on WinXP), but do everything else on Linux. It’s full screen mode actually works as advertised and it’s nice to be able to cut and paste between Win and Linux applications.
If you have the money and you have the need, I definitely recommend VMWare.
That’s not what a virtual machine is. That’s only a specific application of a virtual machine.
“MOL is primarily intended to be used by those who run linux/ppc as their main operating system but still want to be able to run that occasional Mac OS application. Other possible applications include:
• development
• hardware simulation
• server applications
• compatibility testing”
MOL is mostly the same as VMWare, but for powerpc. MOL is free, fast and flexible.
http://www.maconlinux.org/
The installation procedure is very technical till now.
You need to install the application through “./XX.pl” @termial
VMWare need to learn something form Mozilla about packaging.
I had diffeculties trying to direct the application to my Compiled kernel headers under a patched Suse 9.1 OS.
I don’t know if it’s my system, but I upgraded to VMware 4.5.2 a while back when it came out and tried to install Solaris 9 and 10 on it, however during the X detect phase, the machine rebooted and got stuck at the VMware logo of the BIOS. Solaris 9 worked flawlessly on VMware 4.5. Apart from that it’s a very good app. I use it about 50% of the day, and have my webserver running in it.
One annoyance – if you tell your PC to reboot/shutdown and forget to shut down/save the states of the virtual machines, then VMware will just quit, trashing any previous saved states. It’s stupid though, ‘cos if you press the red X to close VMware while you’ve got machines powered on it will tell you that there are running machines. Like Word will tell you that your document has been modified if you do the same, shutdown/reboot the machine when you’ve got a document open. Would be handy if VMware did the same.
OK – i’m rambling…
pac
http://www.newsforge.com/comments.pl?sid=40740&cid=99030