[ltp] Switched to Linux guest on Vmware running on Windows host

[Tom Rockwell]

Mike Heroux wrote:

<snip>

Mike,

Nice writeup, I think your setup is sensible.  The two main things that 
I picked up on are that, first you saved config time since Win2k was 
already installed, and second that the A22p has extra multimedia 
capabilities that aren't working in Linux.

I have just moved from 560x to a x21.  The 560x came with Windows NT, 
which was painful to use - required reboots for network changes and was 
hard to support without a CDROM.  I first dual booted Windows and Linux 
on the 560x and later moved to straight Linux with Windows in VMWare 
(barely usable on 233 MHz Pentium...).  I later upgraded the 560x with a 
  new fluidbearing IBM 30GB harddrive.  The only hitch for Linux on the 
560x was sound, I messed with it a bit, but it never liked to wake up 
after suspends.  The sound hardware on the 560x is junk, and only 
produces crappy sound, so I never bother much about it.  Suspend, 
hibernate worked perfectly.

The x21 came with Windows W2K.  Out of the box ofcourse everything 
worked on it.  However, I "upgraded" this machine to Linux.  The upgrade 
consisted of removing the 30GB drive from the 560x, installing it in the 
  x21 and then booting.  On startup, Redhat found all the hardware 
changes except for the modem, and configured everything.   X, sound, 
ethernet...  That is an easy install ;-)  The only hitch I had was that 
I had to drop the swap partition and merge it into the first DOS 
partition to make space.  Memory went from 64MB to 392MB :-)  I'm just 
using a file for swap.  I did recompile the kernel for i686 instead of 
Pentium MMX.

Suspend and hibernation work ok, the only hitch is that sometimes the 
keyboard doesn't work after resuming from suspend, pressing fn-f7 a few 
time gets it back though.  Sound and networking suspend and resume fine. 
  The ltmodem package installed easily (config scripts did everything). 
  The kernel recognises USB devices, but I don't have the user level 
config up.  The only remaining thing that I haven't tried out is using 
an external monitor.

I've setup VMWare 3 and used my existing Windows client.  I've messed 
enough with dual-booting, being able to have both OSs going at once is 
much more useful for me.

Without a CDROM, it is easier to support Linux as the native OS than 
Windows IMO (I guess Windows Gurus would know how to work around...) 
The x21 doesn't have the DVD, and video in/out like the a22p, so I'm not 
missing out there.  One of these days I'll breakdown and buy a PCMCIA 
cdrom...

Anyways, I think the moral of both of our stories is that it is a lot 
easier to setup an OS that is already setup ;-)

-Tom


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