RUNNING LINUX and, say, WINDOWS at the same time (fwd)

[R. David Whitlock]

I had intended to get this up and running on my own box this morning
before leaving for work, but alas, my flesh is weak (I slept in...).

The screenshots are indeed amazing, and another thing I noticed on the
home page was that you can set each of these 'virtual machines' to run on
a different processor if you have an SMP, or dual processor, system.
Considering the recent responce on slashdot to the "Is SMP worth it?"
question, I had thought there wasn't really much point (they said alot
about applications not really using parallel instructions very well). But
if the labor of each OS was delegated to it's own processor (like they
state on the web page), the program appears far cooler than I had thought
at first.

In response to one statement in the below foreward, I don't think this
will even get close to replacing WINE, because, sadly, this is a
commercial product and is only free for the next month.  They haven't
released what their student pricing will be, but I emailed them and they
did confirm that there would definitely be a student price, which is nice
since they currently want $300 =-(

Anyone else here have it up yet?


Later,
 David

On Wed, 17 Mar 1999 jason at coder.com wrote:

> 
> Thought this might be of some interest to some of you.  I know nothing
> about it other than what is said here (this comes from the linux user's
> group at Cornell).
> 
> Jason
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 14:29:35 -0500
> From: "c. chris erway" <cce3 at cornell.edu>
> To: "David W. Botsch" <dbotsch at cc214.clarityconnect.net>,
>     cslug-L at cornell.edu
> Subject: RUNNING LINUX and, say, WINDOWS at the same time
> 
> yep, this morning at about 12:30am i was one of the first people to get vmware,
> probably.  it's REALLY REALLY sweet.  i posted to slashdot that i had it -- and
> included a URL to my resnet box, where i've got a bunch of screenshots. 
> when vmware.com went down (due to heavy traffic) i put my vmware tgz's up
> (a bad idea) and since 8:30am (when the article was posted) i've received 30,000
> hits and counting (tail -f access_log is running right now, still going pretty
> quickly).
> 
> if you want to see screenshots of me running linux as a host OS and windows 95
> inside a "virtual machine," try this little site i put up:
>            http://cce.nextreme.com/vmware/
> 
> this isn't emulation!  it's actually like booting up a pretend computer on your
> host OS!  look at the screenshots and you'll understand.
> 
> my biggest concern is that the nice people at CIT will get pissed at me
> for all the traffic.  i honestly had no idea slashdot's readership would all
> decide AT ONCE to go to my site ... it was crazy.  people have stopped getting
> the vmware tgz's off my site but i guess the allure of seeing windows run on
> linux is too much.  i think i've served up 3 gigs in four hours... 
> 
> .... i really think this could be the "last straw" for on-the-fence windows
> users.  fear of not being able to run windows programs is obviously very big. 
> this blows it all away.
> 
> installation of vmware is relatively easy.  just follow the instructions and
> you'll be okay: EXCEPT, vmware says you have to make a "virtual hard drive"
> (e.g. a GIANT file in your ~/vmware directory that represents a hard drive) to
> boot off of, and then install Windows from scratch.  you don't have to do this
> -- you can simply set your hard drive to /dev/hda and run vmware to boot off
> your real hard drive.  you obviously have to run vmware as root, then, or you
> will have file permission errors ("can't initialize ide0:0" vmware will say).
>  
> CAVEAT: it'll be like booting up your real computer.  you don't have to worry
> about the windows partitions being mounted in linux already (for some reason
> that works rather well ... you can be running vmware and cp to /mnt/c/blah
> without a hitch) BUT don't boot linux on top of linux!  i haven't tried, but it
> sounds SCARY AS HELL to me.  just choose "windows" or whatever at your
> LILO/syscommander prompt and be happy.
> 
> if anyone wants to try loading their kernel twice via vmware i'd be interested
> to see what happens.
> 
> 
> EVERYONE SHOULD GET THIS THING!  it's amazing!@@!!@
> 
> okay, sorry, but you'll understand the feeling once you run it for the first
> time.
> 
> 
> chris
> 
> On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, David W. Botsch wrote:
> >I was browsing slashdot.org today and came upon a posting about something
> >called vmware. It's available in beta for linux now. The idea evidently is
> >that you run it on your host os and then can run virtual machines with
> >other os's such as MS Windows. I plan on testing it out later as I just
> >registered (it's free right now), but if this works as good as they say,
> >it would provide an immediate fix to the problem of linux users accessing
> >Cornell services available only to Win/Mac not to mention other software.
> >They do have a list of bugs on their page, some major, but nothing too
> >major. Assuming this works as promised, it would appear to be the product
> >in this area that's furtherst along. How this will affect wine and such
> >will remain to be seen, especially that corel has thrown their support
> >behind wine now.
> >The site is: http://www.vmware.com
> 
> --
>  .g$$g, c. chris erway         .g$$g, cce3 at cornell.edu
>  $$$$$$ cornell university     $$$$$$ class of 2002, a&s (undeclared)
>  `S$$S' protium web design co. `S$$S' http://www.protium.com 
> 
>