On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 02:37:25AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Chris G wrote:
The real issue though is that it's simply still *easier* to run a few oddball things in XP in virtualbox, plus it's there if you need to try something else which for some reason doesn't work in Linux (often it doesn't work in Windows either but it's nice to be able to check). Finally it means I can often help friends and family on the phone by doing the same thing on my screen that they're doing to see where they're going wrong.
What have you got *against* running XP (or Vista or W7) in VirtualBox? It's free, it's easy to set up and very, very few people don't have a licence they can use.
Personally I have nothing *against* it, to me it is a necessary evil to be able to replicate customers systems. It doesn't mean I have to like it though.*
Well that is my feeling about it too, I most certainly don't want to run Windows but, as for some other people here too, it's plain *easier* to have a Windows installation.
The problem however with doing this to support one or two applications is that you end up having to maintain 2 operating systems, Windows will still need security updates etc if you are going to let it lose on the network, will still need anti virus measures etc.
To some extent yes but a considerably lesser extent than if you run it as the 'controlling' OS. I don't have any E-Mail going in and out of Windows, there's no visibility of the Windows system from the outside world and I use IE very little. In addition if *it* gets corrupted I just throw the installation away and start at a snapshot again.
For one application I would always see how far I get with wine first, without the VM overhead it usually offers better performance and you don't have to waste system resources booting an entire second OS just to do one thing.
In general the sorts of things that I want to do in Windows are so low-level drivery sorts of things that Wine isn't going to have much chance. OK, my Access database isn't, but the solution to that is to write it using something other than Access.