Re: [Staffslug] Virtual machines

On 01/02/06, Simon Faulkner <simon(a)titanic.co.uk&gt; wrote: > Nice work Russ. Thanks. I was particularly chuffed with the Linux-in-Windows-in-Linux. Not particularly useful, but very satisfyingly geeky :-) > I had a play with Qemu on FC4 and have the linux.img running but havn't > loaded an XP image yet. If you want to emulate x86 on x86, then kqemu apparently increases the speed quite significantly. I haven't tried it, though, since it has to be installed from source, and I generally just install packages. > I have been using VM Ware for many years - it allows me to run several > instances of Win2K, each with a separate version of MS Access (so they > don't argue). It is also great for the snapshot facility so you can > test software against a fresh PC every time and you don't have to worry > about old .dlls lying around. The snapshot facility is apparently one of the things missing from VMWare player. However, since the virtual drive is just a pair of files, it's easy enough to make a copy before you do stuff. I now have a gzipped tarball that contains a bare Windows 2000 with SP4 & patches, so I can create a new Windows 2000 machine by simply extracting those files. We use VMWare a lot at work. We do a lot of development, so it's handy to be able to test how (if) a new app will work on a plain Windows install, or to find out what dependencies it has. > We should also take a look at CoLinux - great for laptops. I've never really played with CoLinux, partly because I don't have a copy of Windows XP. I thought about installing it on my work laptop in my last job, but never quite got around to it. Russ