Re: Will wine|win4lin|VMWare save my XP bacon?
I used to dual boot WinXP and Debian on my Thinkpad X31. I found it to be tedious because, for reasons unknown, Windows partitions would often get corrupted. I wasn't messing with repartitioning or beta filesystem support anything wierd - I would just boot from Windows to Linux for 10 minutes to do something, reboot to WIndows, and wammo - Windows would be corrupt to the point of no return (SFC would fail, I couldn't get booted far enough to troubleshoot, and even trying to work from the boot cd would fail). This happened more than once.
So I went to an only Debian install, and use VMWare for Windows work. VMWare works fantastic for this purpose. When it goes full screen, you cannot tell Linux is even on the system. I do not game or do any sort of 3D stuff, and I do not do computationally heavy work in VMWare either. But, I run some heavy hitting programs, such as ESRI ArcGIS and Adobe Illustrator. Those both run smoothly without trouble.
The only change I made to the laptop once I got serious about VMware was maxing out the RAM (2gb). But if you only use Windows rarely, instead of daily at work like myself, 512mb of RAM should be sufficient. I need 2gb because I usually run 2-3 VMs at the same time, as well as using the Linux base system. If you only one run VM and the Linux base system, you don't need as much RAM. The VMs take up disk space too, obviously. A 60gb virtul hard disk, if full, is 60gb of data. My biggest VM takes up 25gb of data. So I bought an external USB2 disk.
VMWare is not any more stable than any commercial application - and it does lock up sometimes. But in the vast majority of cases, only VMWare freezes, so I can just kill it, an restart it and not have to reboot the real computer.
Windows runs fairly fast. I think the general number is that VMware runs at %80 of the actual system speed. So my 1.6ghz Penium-M should be running at 1.28ghz in VMWare. Plenty fast for me.
The one big problem for me with VMWare is that the Windows machine can have trouble accessing USB devices because Linux often claims them first. Also, even if it does get the USB device, it only has USB1 support right now - and no firewire. I'm not saying VMWare is a lost cause if you need USB support, but you should do further research if USB is important to your Windows usage.
-Z
On 3/31/06, John <JohnRChamplin@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
I'd appreciate advice on whether wine, win4lin, VMWare or some other
route might get me out of a bind. I'm embarrassed, but here's what I
did:
At the start, my ThinkPad (A31) was dual booted via grub, Windows XP
on /dev/hda1, sid on the rest, 2.6.15-homemade kernel. So I added a
second hard drive in the UltraBay. I then copied the XP partition to
the new drive -- dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=$((1*1024*1024)). I
double checked: XP booted and recognized both C: and D: drives. OK, I
thought, and wiped Windows off the original drive, and took it all for
Debian, with / mounted on hda1.
So of course XP doesn't boot from its new location, even though grub
finds it via update-grub. Shouldda known! If anyone knows how I might
just enable the XP copy on /dev/hdb1, aka D:, I'd be grateful. I've
investigated, so far nothing.
Another choice would be to forget XP, except that it is on rare
occasion (involving proprietary dial-up) handy. Yet another would be
to bite the bullet, wipe the drive, repartition, reinstall that Other
OS on hda, and then reinstall sid. Ugh, what a chore!
Is there a third family of choices? Would wine, win4lin, VMWare or
something else be able to run XP where it is?
Thanks for any advice, if only to think twice next time! (Wait: I know
that now!)
--
JohnRChamplin@columbus.rr.com
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--
Its been so long,
and the groove in my heart is nearly gone,
Oh my head's in the clouds,
but I'm landing on my feet. - JK
www.falderal.net
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