vmware ??

[Frank 'Crash' Edwards]

On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Peter Soderling wrote:
> > Is anyone running vmware on a thinkpad?
> 
> Absolutely!  (770X)  I had configured my system to dual boot WinNT and
> RedHat 6. I then installed VMware in Linux and created a virtual machine.
> Then I told the virtual machine to boot the existing copy of WinNT off the
> proper partition. It works well . . . and the performance is much faster
> than I expected.

I will be installing VMware in the next couple of days as well (on my
770X).

Re: performance, don't even bother with Windoze95/98.  They do entirely
too much polling of the hardware -- Win98 was useless on an old PPro200
with 512kb cache.  But WinNT is actually usable, if not necessarily
"pleasant". :-)

> > 1. The cd-rom isn't visible inside the win98 window. I tried mounting it
> > before 'booting' win98 but that doesn't work either. It's set up in
> > vmware-config ot work, yet it doesn't appear in My Computer.
> 
> I would suspect that the reason for this is that you have a non-stock IDE
> driver controlling both your hd and your cdrom. (perhaps piixide.sys is
> installed). I had problems with this (the driver and the hd - not the cdrom,
> like you're having) when I tried to boot NT through VMware. I would get the
> error message "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" on the blue screen. After I
> replaced the piixide driver with the standard ATAPI 1.2 driver from the
> WinNT cd everything worked fine. This could be your cdrom problem as well .
> . .

I haven't seen this, but I'll keep it in my for my future install.
Thanks.

> > 2. Should I install the vmware tools or not? The vmware instructions say
> > that the tools replace the X server. But I'm running Bill's server to get
> > X to even work on the thinkpad. Will installing vmware tools undo the
> > wonderful things that Bill's server did?
> 
> You should definitely install the VMware Tools. Be aware that the tools are
> installed on your GUEST os, not on linux. The biggest advantage to
> installing the tools is that they provide you with the driver for the
> display. AFAK, it is the only way to get a decent display on your guest os.
> 
> As far as the VMware modified X server. . . . it doesn't work on my TP. They
> do offer a patch though .  . so perhaps one of our friends who's into such
> things as compiling X could apply it to the Bill Mair patched server. ;-)

Hopefully, the XFree team will roll Bill's changes into the stock server
sooner instead of later. :-)  Of course, I won't be holding my breath on
this one.

> > 3. Should the win98 window be resizeable? Mine isn't.
> 
> If I'm understanding the problem correctly, when you install the graphics
> driver from the tools, this should be taken care of.
> 
> Good luck,
> 
> --petesoder

Thanks, Peter.  Good information that I didn't already have!

Ciao.
--
Frank J. Edwards         Edwards & Edwards Consulting
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