I'm not Bill, but I've used both and will be happy to offer some observations comparing the two.
I do a lot of digital photography, and for reasons I won't go into now, my primary desktop was moved from WindowsXP Pro to Fedora Core 8. PhotoShop CS3 does not run under linux, so I needed an alternate solution. There are lots of image manipulation and raw conversion packages that work under Linux, but each has its quirks, and I haven't seen any that I like as well as CS3 with ACR. Therefore, I needed a solution to run Windows software on my linux box. Wine is great for some things. CS3 doesn't work with Wine. Xen appears to requre a newer processor than mine, with specific hyperviser support. I have a Socket 939 AMD64 X2 3800. I use VMware at work, and it works well. I tried it, and found that the virtual video driver for Windows guest does not support color management. Virtual Box came to the rescue. It's free, and it has a great feature set. So I started with VB. But then, as I worked with it, the blemishes started to appear. The shared filesystem doesn't work. Whenever I tried to use it, it was OK for a while, and then it hung. OK - I asked about this, found that it was a known problem, and until it's resolved I should use Samba. That works, but I'm not very excited about the speed. I process a lot of fairly large files at one sitting, typically hundreds of raw 12.8 megapixel raw files from my Canon EOS 5D. Performance at processing images, and moving large files around is critical. When I tried to work on a directory with a couple hundred images in it, my virtual box ground to a halt. I looked into it a bit, and found that in addition to requiring Samba, VB does not support a virtual machine with more than one processor. It's great for some things, but it could not provide the performance that I need. Unfortunately, the only Windows-on-Linux solution that I could find did not provide adequate performance. I had to reevaluate the options, or purchase a new computer. When I generated a color profile for my monitor using Argyll (a hard-to-use but excellent package) under linux, it loaded a LUT into my X server, that affected the color of all my images, not those in color-managed programs. I thought I'd look at PS under VMware another time. To my great surprise, the LUT seemed to take care of my color management needs. I suspect that it made the virtual display look like an sRGB device, when is the default display profile. This may bypass some abilities of my monitor (to display colors outside the sRGB gamut), but it makes the display on PS in the VMware virtual machine match my prints. It works. So, in summary: Virtual Box looks great and has features that I thought I needed. Unfortunately, it did not provide the performance I needed. VMware provides *much* better performance (at least in my environment), and has the features that I actually need. Incidentally, with VMware - you can download the eval version of Workstation, and create your virtual machine. Then, when the evaluation license expires, you can still use the VM with the free VMware Player. David Pablo Sanchez wrote: > On Wednesday 13 February 2008 at 10:01 am, Bill Earnshaw penned > about "Re: [vbox-users] USB on Virtual Box 1.5.4 ..." > > >> Look take it from me...it's like banging your head on a brick >> wall.....save yourself and your sanity.....install Vmware at least >> until they iron out the bugs between "Virtualbox and LinuxMint! >> > > Hi Bill, > > When I test drove VMware, I wasn't too impressed. Aside from the USB > issue with VirtualBox, how would you compare the two? > > Cheers, > _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
