On Thursday 06 November 2003 09:12, Jenny Hopkins wrote:
VMware - what an excellent idea. I was thinking of looking into WINE, but it didn't sound as though it would be over-reliable for msaccess, and I have to maintain a db for work in this (although I've just ported the back end over to postgresql on the linux server :-)). I'll go off and look at costs and spec.
It must be said it's not cheap. not by any means. But there are a number of usefull advantages I use it almost everyday (admittedly the other way round, VMware running on an XP Laptop with Debian and SuSE inside) It has a number of very usefull features. You can make the virtual machines disk non-persistant so if you want to do somethine potentially dangerous a simple reboot will restore the machine back to how it was before.
Anyway the filesystems of the virtual machines are a couple of files on the host system so they are easy to backup/move between VMware installations etc.
On a decent machine, it is pretty fast, fast enough for most things anyway.
The networking is cool, you can have a virtual ethernet to the virtual machine running over your hosts connection, appearing as a separate machine on the network. Or you can bridge between the Host and the virtual machine.
USB, some ports, Floppy's and sound all work in the virtual machine.
If I ever make it to a meet and you are there, remind me to show you VMware on my laptop.
There is VirtualPC, that is very similar, but of course you can't run Linux as the host OS on that one AFAIK