[ILUG] Re: Is vmware real?

[Timothy Murphy]

On Saturday 18 March 2006 19:30, Breno Gomes wrote:

> I was very skeptical about VMWare a year ago.
...
> I decided to give VMWare Player a try. I was able to run a Windows
> virtual machine for Avaya IP Agent (bridged) and a Linux virtual machine
> for VPN through NAT. The laptop was no longer required and work from
> home was smooth again.
>
> There is no definitive answer for any VMWare suitability. The bottom
> line is your specific requirement.

I must admit Slax and  vmware have both lost a couple of marks
in my estimation today.

Almost certainly due to an error on my part,
the MBR on my ThinkPad got screwed up in some way,
and I just got a page of 9A's when I booted.
(Why can't Lilo give sensible error messages?)

(1) I downloaded the latest Knoppix,
and put it on a CD.
But when I tried to re-install lilo
by mounting the partition and chroot-ing to /mnt/hda1 ,
all my devices disappeared.
Is this a feature of vmware?

Anyway I re-wrote /etc/lilo.conf to use /mnt/hda1/vmlinuz, etc,
and in the end got lilo re-installed and working.

(2) I decided after all this to install grub,
so I downloaded GRUB*.mo and ran mo2dir .
This transferred the grub files to /usr/share/
but didn't install them in /boot/grub as I had expected.
I've actually never had an mo2dir that worked perfectly.
It is definitely quite a bit inferior to yum install under Fedora.

I  must say the latest Slax CD I downloaded ran very well -
I think I prefer it to Knoppix.

I'd hoped to boot the ThinkPad from my Aldi external HD,
but it seems not to allow that.

> I am available to share more details and my own experience.

I may get back to you on that later.
I like the look of vmware,
but it may be for wiser heads than mine.





-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland