Re: gEDA-user: VMPlayer Image

[Joshua Boyd <jdboyd@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 07:44:27PM -0600, John Griessen wrote:

> I heard from a professor that the concept of offering server machines 
> loaded with gEDA and such was a dead issue because of VMware's market share 
> and popularity for avoiding installation time, and just using huge areas of 
> disks as tools.  I suppose some people might have 5 or so disk images
> they use in order to avoid integrating it all and getting 5
> tools/entertainment_programs that way.  Is that a good guess? 

VMWare probably isn't so good for entertainment programs.  It does pass
through OpenGL acceleration to some extent though.

Also, it is an easy way to test stuff against Ubuntu or different FC
versions, without constantly rebooting.  I would imagine that Xen would
be good as well, but Xen isn't particularly easy to use, and I don't
know how it deals with graphical stuff, as I said.
 
> Is VMware's emulation now THAT good, that the usual 2GHz+ hardware has no 
> trouble with it?  and they offer a freebie now?  (If you get someone else's 
> image)

VMWare Server runs adequately fast on a 2.8ghz Xeon w/ 2 gigs of ram.
At work the IT guy has that set up running something like 6 images.  Ram
allocations are a bit skimpy (web services have 32-128 megs each,
desktop installs for testing stuff have 256 megs allocated).

The other developer where I work constantly complains about the speed
compared to his desktop, but every time I try to look into it, the
laptop runnign linux in vmware beats the pants off the desktop for
building software, or even running gedit, so I don't know what he is
complaining about.

> How many images can run at once with "Player"?

One.  But, there is also a free Server.  It runs lots of images (don't
know the max), but it caps the resolution at 1024x768 and doesn't do
full screen mode.

> Is that their marketing ploy?  If you want real convenience, you need a 
> VMware license?

Previously we (me and the IT guy) had trouble getting networking working
nicely with laptops without buying the Workstation product instead of
Player.  The IT guy says he has resolved that, but I don't know what the
trick was.  What the problem was that player supported bridge or loopback,
but not both at once.  With loopback, the VMWare machines can't talk to
the outside world (except perhaps via setting up a proxy or routing
system on the host I guess), but with bridging, VMWare can't talk to the
host when disconnected from a network (like sitting on you lap in an
airport without wireless).  I don't know where Server sits in this mix.
This trouble was discovered when trying to setup Linux on Windows for
another developer who refused to remove windows from the laptop, and
also refused to try colinux.

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


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