I am not running XP or Vista, but I do run Windows 98 as a guest image under VMware on one of my machines. More precisely, I use vmplayer, which is free, and does a pretty good job as a virtualizer.
vmware makes virtual disks (.vmdk files) which the guest image treats like real disks. When the guest image is halted, the images are accessable with a program called vmware-mount.pl . I have not explored this in detail, but it looks like an interesting way to get at the windows files from the host. If it is a Linux host, then dirvish/rsync could back up the guest via the host. Performance-wise, a vmware guest is not as fast as running natively on bare metal, but it is close, and the performance gap is narrowing. Virtual machines are the Next Big Thing. So it may be possible to wrap your XP or Vista guest in a thin Linux shell, which takes care of firewalling and networking and other things that Windows is weak at, while still providing compatability for most important things. Those of you maintaining a windows presence to run business apps might consider this, and I would be interested in the experiences of folks using XP and Vista as to whether this works. BTW, there are beta versions of VMWare 6.0 available for free download, but they don't do anything I need that vmware player doesn't , and they add run in debug mode (slower). Still, those versions might be useful to some of you experimenters. So, windows folks, look at VMware, and let us know what you think. Keith BTW, I store most of the important Windows 98 files on a D drive, which is a physical vfat partition on my hard drive. I do dirvish backups directly on that partition if windows isn't running, so I haven't needed vmware-mount.pl . I put the .vmdk binary files in a directory that dirvish/rsync ignores, then occasionally copy them into a directory that dirvish does back up ( and with every change, another 300MB or so used up on the backup drive, I don't back up these big blobs often). -- Keith Lofstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list [email protected] http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
