Re: A few questions about 10.2 and/or VMWare 5.x and/or MS Virtual PC

cat wrote:
I just got 10.2 up and running under VMWare 5.5.3 using XP Pro as a host.

As others mentioned, it's more smooth the other way around (10.2 as host, XP as guest.) VMware seems better optimized to run XP inside it rather than anything else.


A few questions for you wizards if you don't mind:

1. It seems that XGL isn't supported on VMWare as of yet - at least from
what I've read on the VMWare forums - has anyone had any success with this
or could you give me some pointers on some things to try to
perhaps get it to work?

3D acceleration is only supported with XP running both as guest as well as host. :P


2. Regarding the above question, does MS Virtual PC do a better job at
this?

Virtual PC has huge problems running anything inside it that doesn't have "Microsoft" in it's name. That means no special tools (like VMware tools) or drivers. You'll be stuck with slow mouse, 16 (or 256) color graphics and slow or no network at all.

It's only good for running Microsoft OSes as guests.


3. I've got another box dual booting with W2K and Ubuntu 6.10, but I"m
thinking of wiping that entirely and just loading 10.2 on it, but it's
only got an old ATI Rage Pro video card and 384 megs of RAM - will 10.2
suck on it and will XGL run at all?

Forget it :P


4. At some point in this lifetime, I'd like to give Windoze the heave ho
once and for all, but I've got apps I just can't leave behind (proprietary
stuff like ham radio and other comm gear software/Zire apps/etc.) - are
the above options (and maybe MS Virtual Server) pretty much what I've got
as far as setting this with both OS's without doing the dual boot merry
go round?

If you intent to gradually switch to Linux, it's best to install Linux on the PC, install VMware and run XP as a guest. Way more smooth (but no 3D support in the XP guest). After you install the VMware tools in the XP guest, the speed is just awesome.

Note that the VMware tools don't come with the freeware versions of VMware (Player and Server). You have to extract them from the VMware Workstation tar.gz (it's an ISO inside the tar.gz; extract that and mount it in the XP guest; it will autostart and install the tools and mouse/graphics drivers).
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