I spent quite a while working with VMware 1.x. I think version 2.x
has been released now, and it's probably better in every way.
I've never used win4linux. Nonetheless, here's what I know.
VMware can emulate a standard VGA video card vvveeerrryyy
ssslllooowwwlllyyy at 640x480. It also has its own video driver,
which uses the native hardware's resolutions and is nearly as fast as
the native hardware for most ops, but is very slow at a few ops,
including drawing pop-up menus. VMware runs noticeably faster if you
give it the whole screen unstead of running it in a window. Overall,
it's quite usable for business apps. Probably sucks for games. (I
don't know -- I didn't play any games.)
VMware emulates a fixed set of peripherals: the aforementioned video,
an AMD PCNet Ethernet card, some kind of Sound Blaster, PS/2 mouse and
keyboard, IDE disks, floppy, and ATAPI CD-ROM. (Maybe serial ports
too.) If you want to use anything else from inside the guest OS, you
can't.
I needed Windows NT so I could compile and test a large cross-platform
application using Visual C++. The app compiled in about 45 minutes on
NT running natively, but it took nearly 2 hours to compile under
VMware on the same hardware. The slowdown seemed to be two things --
VMware adds its own CPU overhead to context switches and mode
switches, and the virtual machine ran best with less than 128 Mb of
RAM, while the real machine had 256 Mb, so NT was able to do less
caching. (Where'd the other 128 Mb go? The X server, other apps,
Linux' buffer cache, VMware's virtual screen (don't run 1600x1200x32
(-: ), the Linux kernel, in pretty much that order.)
Anyway, for my workload, VMware didn't cut it. Now I run Linux on
one PC and NT on another, and use x2vnc to share one keyboard/mouse
between them.
Your mileage may vary.
--
K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jogger-egg.com/
