RE: VMware

[Wim Kerkhoff <wim@netmaster.ca>]

I HAD good experiences with VMware under Debian.  

It worked fine for me last summer, but somehow somewhere something messed up. 
At the moment, vmware causes my system to lock up.  It brings up the gui and
the wizard just fine; however, just before it brings up the guest Bios, my
system freezes.  I can't kill X, and I can't telnet in, but I can ping the
system from another computer.

Has anybody seen this before?  Does anybody have an ideas as to what is
happening here? I would really like to get this issue resolved.

When I had it running, Windows 98 w/IE5 ran fine.  This was at 1024x768 @
24bit color.  It was quite fast (considering...) on my AMD K6-2 with 128MB
SDRAM.  I had VNC, ipmasq, samba, etc, set up on my system, so I could play
lots of interesting tricks with it.  I did find that shutting down extra things
on my debian system like apache, postgres, staroffice, etc, really helped
performance as well.

I've heard scary tales from someone who loaded an existing Windows
98 partition on its own partition... It tooks hours and hours to detect, add,
remove all the changed hardware.  After that, he couldn't dual boot into
Windows 98 natively.  Your best off not to take this route...

I know someone else who runs Mandrake, Windows 98, and Windows NT as guest OS's
on his Debian laptop with little problems.  Then again, he has one of those
nice new Dell laptops, so the system has lots of extra juice...


On 01-Feb-2000 Lance Heller wrote:
> What experience good, bad, or otherwise have Debian users had with
> VMware?  I have a requirement to use an application that only runs on
> one or another flavor of a Redmond virus and am deciding whether to
> convert my laptop to dual boot W98, or use VMware instead.  
> 
> Thank you for your comments.
> 
> Lance

Regards,

Wim Kerkhoff              
wim@netmaster.com
www.canadianhomes.net/wim