Re: gEDA-user: VMPlayer Image

[Joshua Boyd <jdboyd@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 03:14:03PM -0500, al davis wrote:

> I googled it .. it seems that it relates to some commercial 
> product called "VMware", and "VMplayer" is a cover-crop variant 
> of VMware.
> 
> What can I do with a "VMPlayer Image" ...  Assuming I have 
> VMPlayer (which I don't) is the "image" just something to view?  
> a starting point for a system?  ... or what?

VMWare Player (and Server) is gratis, but you are not at liberty with
it.  

The image is a starting point for a virtual system.

The image is basically just a disk image that VMWare will use to boot a
virtual machine, which will have a virtual display that shows up in a
window on your desktop, uses the virtual disk (specifically, the image
file) via a virtual SCSI card, and talks to a virtual NIC (which can
either be NAT'ed with your machines onboard network connection, or with
a compatible desktop ethernet device, can pretend to be an entirely new
NIC with it's own MAC).

When VMWare first launched, the main usage of it was to run Windows on
Linux, or Linux on Windows.

Rather than emulate everything, VMWare runs the guest system natively,
but traps the execution of priveledged code and emulates just those
features, so it isn't anywhere near as slow as Bochs or Qemu.  VMWare is
thus x86 only.x

What VMWare does very right is that it allows you to easily move virtual
machines, in the form of images, from one machine to another.  As far as
I know, it is not possible to do this with Solaris Zones (although they
say they are working on it), Parallels, VirtualPC, or Xen.  So, if you
have developed a web application with a lot of dependencies, instead of
the end user having to spend hours trying to get everything installed,
they can instead download a few hundred meg VMWare image, and boot the
already configured web app server, answer a few questions, then get
straight to using it in only a few minutes.

Does that answer your question?  In this case a VMWare image could be a
useful alternative to a LiveCD, with the benefit that you can keep your
regular desktop running at the same time as the Image, which you can't
exactly do with a livecd.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/


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