[ale] Linux DESKTOP User's Group

[JD]

> Just an FYI, I'm currently doing this with Centos on virtualbox.  I'd 
> like to know if you have any issues and/or what vm you plan to use.
> 
> I'm considering moving to vmware.

I've been running my "daily desktop" inside a Vbox VM for about 4 years now.
Windows is the hostOS (for other reasons).
I love that my VMs are hardware agnostic.  No worries about network drivers.
I've only used 13GB of storage for it all this time.
Migrated between 3 different physical machines during that time ... WinXP,
Vista, Win7 as hosts.  When it is time to change,
* load VirtualBox,
* Truecrypt a partition to hold the VMs,
* Copy/restore my backups and
* start up my trusty desktop VM

100% productive with everything exactly as it was before.

Stability the last year has been rock solid. The host and the VMs do not crash.
Before then, I'd need to reboot Win7 weekly to prevent a lock up.

When a new distro/OS is available, testing with personal settings inside a new
VM is without risk and easy. It is just 13G of storage after all.

On Linux hosts, we're migrating to KVM/Qemu, but those are mainly servers, not
desktops with intensive graphics.

I've been dissatisfied with a few VMware corporate decisions the last 12 months,
so ...

BTW, there are 6 different "vmware" virtualization tools, so clearly saying
which would be very helpful.