Bob,
Thanks for the VMWare review. If it's indeed better than Win4lin
then I'm not sure I'm ready for either one of them.
Steve
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Stephen A. Brenner - Arch-Way Net-Works - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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On Tue, 30 May 2000, Bob Miller wrote:
> 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/
>
