[ale] Mainly Linux but a smidgen MS

[Frank Zamenski]

I've used it before, and thought it very stable and useful. Seems the only
way to go should one need their MS apps yet not want to bother with dual
booting. (I have even gotten it to work on a RH 6.1 P166 w 64mb ram, with
Win95b and a gluttony of MS apps within as the guest OS. (I don't however
recommend this unless one is very patient, and some report not being able to
load VMW on an anemic system like this at all.) But on a 450Mhz with 128mb,
performance was quite good, and on an Athlon 500 w 256mb and all SCSI hd's,
it was darn near steller. I liked how NT as guest was quite tolerable in
both boxes, and even better yet in full screen mode. Actually, running NT
like this delivers a good feeling of comfort and security by eliminating the
worry of the ever present threat of the damn thing doing a BSOD... because,
so what if it does, just close the vm and 'reboot' it!

Now IMO, the (minor) downside: it's online 'docs' are sometimes confusing,
to even poor. I've read (somewhere) in passing that one can load Linux
behind a functional Win partition, then load VMware within Linux, than point
it toward the original Win as a raw partition... and, I suppose, get the
best of all worlds with dual boot also? Of course, Win can not be in the
fstab et al. Can anyone verify that?

-fgz


From: "Dow Hurst" <dhurst at kennesaw.edu>
To: ale at ale.org
To: <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 6:43 PM
Subject: [ale] Mainly Linux but a smidgen MS


> For those who are dual booting or needing MS based software, I'd like to
> suggest trying out vmware as an alternative.  I was just answering an
> email on the ale list and had put in some stuff about vmware.  I
> realized that really, unless there is some hardware that is unusual, you
> don't have to dual boot.  Maybe games would be a problem.  I have a Dell
> Latitude CPt laptop that I carry around from home to work.  I put SuSE
> 6.4 on it with great success.  Then I loaded the latest version of
> vmware off the vmware website.  Installed and patched Win95 and Office97
> with the latest patches.  Put on some other Win95 based software like
> ChemX, ChemWindows, WSftp95.  I have to have a large amount of RAM and a
> fast enough CPU.  The laptop has 192Mb RAM and a 333MHz Celeron.  The
> full screen mode of Vmware is great and Win95 is responsive.  I have
> turned off in Office97 the setting that controls "pretty scrolling"
> which does slow down the display alot.  I am self sufficient for what I
> need out of Win95 at this point.  Someone who needs games may not be at
> all.
>
> The virtual network uses DHCP to assign the virtual PC an address of
> 192.168.112.x from the range that you can set.  If you have enough RAM
> and disk space, you may have any OS that runs on x86 architecture
> running in a window just as I have Win95.  I had originally loaded Win98
> successfully but blew that away as I wanted Win95 instead.
>
> Any changes made to the virtual PC can be kept from being permanent.  So
> if I want to try a new package, I can make vmware not allow changes to
> the system to be permanent until I decide I like the results.  If the
> package screws up the registry or the network settings, I just reboot
> without allowing the changes to be final.  Presto! I am back to a
> working unchanged system.
>
> The price for vmware was cheap for me as I am on staff at an educational
> institution.  I hope this suggests an alternative for those who can try
> this out.  Best wishes,
> Dow
>
> --
> __________________________________________________________
> Dow Hurst                   Office: 770-499-3428
> Systems Support Specialist  Fax:    770-423-6744
> 1000 Chastain Rd.
> Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
> Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
> Kennesaw, GA 30144
> *********************************
> *Computational Chemistry is fun!*
> *********************************
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