[ale] VM ?

Dow_Hurst dhurst at mindspring.com
Mon Feb 26 22:37:04 EST 2007


Have you looked at CodeWeaver's version of Wine?  It may be tweaked to run a later version of Quicken.  You'd have to check though.

I use VMware alot for providing MSOffice, Adobe products, and Endnote on our research workstations.  Works like a charm.  You can use NAT networking for the virtual network and machine so it hides behind your host OS.  You can switch full screen and back with hot keys.  It is a very robust VM implementation.  The coolest part of using a VM is that once the virtual machine has the OS installed and configured it is just a set of files on your disk.  You can dump that to a tape or DVD backup and always have that as a pristine clean install to move around or reuse as you please.  If you keep your data files from programs on a Samba network share then the virtual machine you can access the files from any machine rather than having them hidden in your virtual machine's virtual disk.  Backup the data from the Samba share as required.  If the virtual machine's OS gets corrupted, you can just replace it with your pristine backup off the tape or DVD.

VMware uses kernel level modules so each time the kernel is updated you will need rerun as root vmware-config.pl.  You have to have the kernel sources and symbols installed for vmware-config.pl to build the vmware modules.  On Opensuse I do this after a kernel update:

cd /usr/src/linux
gunzip -c /proc/config.gz > ./.config
make prepare
vmware-config.pl  (just take the defaults to get thru it fast)

That is it for maintaining vmware after a kernel update on opensuse.  You use to have to also use a wrapper to get sound to work but now sound seems pretty integrated into ALSA and artsd.  Your Core2Duo machine could run 64bit and I believe you can have a 64bit virtual machine too.  One last bit of advice on vmware, if you want the best performance, you can dedicate a raw partition for vmware to use instead of having files representing the virtual machine on your local filesystem.  However, you would need to make a dd copy of the raw partition to copy your virtual machine to a backup.

RAM is important when running a VM.  It requires the same amount of RAM that a regular PC running XP would.  And that is not available to the host OS at all while the VM is operating.  I'd recommend 256 Mb min for a typical low usage VM.  For people running multiple VM's you need alot of RAM.
Hope this helps!
Dow


-----Original Message-----
>From: Paul Cartwright <paul_tbot at pcartwright.com>
>Sent: Feb 26, 2007 6:53 PM
>To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
>Subject: Re: [ale] VM ?
>
>On Monday 26 February 2007 04:04:07 pm Jerry Yu wrote:
>> if only a handful of windows app, what about WINE instead of VM ?
>
>the problem is, Quicken 2003 is what I was using on Wine, nothing newer would 
>run. On the Windows side I was running 2006.
>
>-- 
>Paul Cartwright
>Registered Linux user # 367800
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale


No sig.



More information about the Ale mailing list