Than you Stefan, I followed your advice and looked at VirtualBox.
Quite nice, almost the same as VMware Workstation and better in some
part of it like: it comes in many more languages than English and the
best of it is the Import facility which is a standard feature directly
under "Fichier | Importer une application virtuelle...". VMware has the
same thing but you have to download and install ovftool which is kind of
hard to find on the web. With that tool I was able to export 3 different
machines from Workstation: SLES10-SP364, Win2008R2/64, and a standard
XP-SP3/32 then import them in VirtualBox. On those machines in
VirtualBox I had trouble until I uninstalled VMwareTools to have the
different machines to work properly.
Since VirtualBox is FOSS and:
1) comes from SUN,
2) SUN was bought by Oracle,
3) Oracle screwed up OpenSolaris,
4) Oracle is screwing up MySQL
5) Oracle is screwing up OpenOffice,
I always prefer FOSS over proprietary but now my serious doubts and
question: is Oracle VirtualBox a good way to go for a long run???
Michel-André
********************************************************************
Le 2010-10-28 09:55, Stefan Monnier a écrit :
I am looking for a laptop to carry around and make demonstrations using
Linux and some specific applications.
You mean GNU/Linux?
I want to install OpenSuSE, Centos, or Kubuntu as the host system.
Ah, indeed you do.
Then I will install VMware Workstation on the host.
Why not a Free Software virtualisation, like virtualbox?
I need 64bits, at least 4 GB RAM (6 or 8 is better), and a reasonable
screen. Standard disk space is OK.
No idea what's a "reasonable screen". For me it's « 14" or less with
1400x900 or more», but it seems I'm quite unlike many people in this respect.
I looked at an ASUS K72JR-B1 but it looks that it is not supporting
Linux. Same thing with Dell Vostro 3300.
There are very very few laptops that support GNU/Linux, sadly.
IIRC Dell has/had a few, otherwise you'll have to try system76.com or
emperorlinux or one of those.
Any suggestions?
Most laptops will run GNU/Linux just fine. The typical problematic
parts are the video (NVidia is not very cooperative and hence not well
supported: better stay with Intel or ATI nowadays) and the wifi chip
(most machines don't tell you what chip they come with, so you have to
take a chance and if it doesn't work well enough, you'll have to
replace the wifi card; it's almost always on a separate mini-pci-express
card and you can buy new ones at ebay or various other places for $20
or so, and these do tell you which chip they use, so you can easily
make sure they're well supported).
Stefan
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