On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 11:47:23PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 22:49 +0100, cl@isbd.net wrote:
It seems to me that I'll take a "suck it and see" approach after getting the new hardware. If Vmware doesn't work for me then I've lost nothing and can just use the new machine in the way I'm using my present one.
I think you will get on with it quite well. I am running Workstation on a AMD 64 with 1GB of Ram. It runs Windows XP well enough that running fullscreen (and excepting 3D graphics) it is very hard to tell..I can leave XP running and still have heavy stuff running on the host machine with little or no perceptible performance loss.
In fact so much so the XP machine often gets left running and forgotten about on the 4th workspace.
That's almost exactly like what I'll be aiming to do.
Currently I run a virtual desktop on my Win2k machine and have my Linux desktop running in one of the Win2k machine's desktops. Sort of like you but the other way about. However my setup requires two machines at the moment as the Linux desktop is displayed using an X server on the Win2k machine and a 'remote' Linux system. If I can do it all on one machine I'll be a hppy bunny.
It also of course means I can create new Slackware (for example) Vmware images and use them to upgrade slackware and then copy my old Slackware configuration across to the new one. That is a very big plus for me as I'm always wondering whether an upgrade is worth the hassle when it involves actually upgrading an existing install, or moving to a different machine.
I think what I may (ultimately) do is install a supported Linux distribution as my Vmware host and then have both my working Slackware system and my 'desktop' Win2k as virtual Vmare images on the host Linux. The host Linux can then remain totally uncustomised (and thus easy to upgrade when it becomes necessary) and I can duplicate/upgrade the images to my heart's content.