On Sunday 10 October 2004 9:25 am, Anthony Anson wrote:
For those who justifiably may be puzzled, I beta test my ISP's internet software, and it's written to run in Windows. I have a caddy in the machine and four trays for it.
<serious question> I have debian in one tray, will have Win 98SE in another, and Win 2000 in the third. Knoppix will run from CD.
(Bearing in mind that I have no intention of *EVER* loading XP), available to load I have CP/M, DOS 6.22, Win 3.11 and OS2. I have very old Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Mini-Linux distros, and I have a hankering to try PetrOS. I can't bear to have a fiver's worth of tray in the 'Come In Handy Even If I Never Use It' box.
Wow that sounds like a really hard way to go about things, but then I guess even with your fastest machine VMware is going to be a slow alternative.
I run VMware with Linux as a host at home (AMD 32_64) and with XP as a host on my office Laptop (IBM Thinkpad R40) I can build an OS on one machine and then move the virtual drive images to the other. I can take like snapshots of the different OS's just after I have built them, that way if they become contaminated by something I am testing I can revert to the previous snapshot.
You can even configure VMware to run the virtual disks in non persistant mode, that way when you hit the power button of the virtual machine it reverts to it's pre power on state.
Cool feature number two is that with a special support tool you can create a VMware snapshot of a Physical machine, So If I want to try something potentially destructive on an important machine I can take a snapshot, boot it as a VM and play first.
Yes it is a significant software cost (particurally as I had to buy VMware twice) but it has paid for itself about 10 times over so far.