Re: wmware on Debian
On Thu, May 20, 1999 at 08:11:52AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
>
> On Thu, 20 May 1999 14:02:24 -0000 (UTC), Pollywog wrote:
>
> >> Didn't work worth a damn for me. The install spazed a couple of times,
> >> and when I got annoyed enough to remove it, it took a couple of things
> >> with it (like my mouse). I might try again in a month or so ...
>
> It really isn't that hard. Just a case of RTFFP.
>
> >Interesting. When VMWare first came out, I was using OpenLinux, and I did
> >not see any complaints about VMWare on the Caldera mailing list, only
> >comments about how good it was. Maybe it is one of those libc6 v. libc5
> >issues.
>
> Nope, in this case I think the problem is between the chair and the
> keyboard. I got it up and running in about an hour, main problem was getting
> portions to compile with the current kernel so I could have networking. Has
> Win95 installed about 3 hours after that. It is not the fastest thing on the
> block when you only give it 16MB of RAM which ends up coming partially out of
> swap and running it in on a P5-100. But once installed Windows ran fine,
> networked with the rest of my network flawlessly. Was quite interesting SMB
> mounting a drive from the same physical machine. I was almost half tempted to
> install FreeBSD just to tweak the nose of my friend who is a FreeBSD, ex-Linux
> user. :)
>
> >I did not try it then because I did not have a Win95 CD, only floppies. I
> >see now that it will accept the guest OS on floppies.
>
> Yup. Personally, I think for developers VMWare is something of a godsend.
> Imagine this simple situation, run VMWare on your machine, give it ~16Mb or
> so, and then run Debian inside Debian. The outer Debian is stable, the inner
> is unstable. I won't call it the "perfect" sandbox, but for $99 bucks, it is
> a damned good sandbox. Test out what unstable will do and if it screws up,
> darn, reinstall, didn't affect your production environment.
I did a floppy installation when it first came out. It was somewhat
frustrating because the floppy read kept timing out. Win 95 was
agonizingly slow on a P-150 (it felt more like a 386sx-16), but after I
upgraded my MB and CPU to a K6/2-350 it performs quite adequately. I
tried using a native Win95 partition in the raw mode and it slowed down
considerably.
I also tried Win 98 and it runs a bit more smoothly (win 95 occasionally
won't initialize sound), but some 16-bit apps seem to not like it. I
don't know if they would have the same problem with native win 98, since
it doesn't seem to like my motherboard at all which just reinforced my
affection for Microsoft. Unfortunately there are a few needed apps
which I can't handle with Linux, although the list is getting smaller
all the time.
The non-commercial price is discounted to $75 until mid-July and they
still offer a 30-day free trial evaluation license. You need to re-run
the install script when upgrading kernels, since it installs some
modules. I'm running potato/kernel 2.2.9 and am about to dump my Win95
partition and mount /home in that space.
Bob
--
Bob Nielsen Internet: nielsen@primenet.com
Tucson, AZ AMPRnet: w6swe@w6swe.ampr.org
DM42nh http://www.primenet.com/~nielsen
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