vmware ??

[Mark Kennedy]

Bob Koss wrote:
> 
> Is anyone running vmware on a thinkpad?
> 
> I have RH6.0 installed on a 770Z and just installed vmware.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> 3. Should the win98 window be resizeable? Mine isn't.
> 
> Robert Koss, Ph.D.  | Object Mentor, Inc.    | Tel: (800) 338-6716
> Senior Consultant   | 14619 N Somerset Cr    | Fax: (847) 918-1023
> koss@oma.com        | Green Oaks IL 60048    | www.oma.com

i'm running RH6.0 and vwmare v1.0.1 on a 770Z w/320M.  i'm running NT SP3 under
vmware, giving it 64M.  i originally tried using a native NT partition that was
already on the laptop, but the vmware support for native partitions is buggy and
it kept complaining about disk writes outside the range of the partition.  i've
had no problems using the standard file-backed virtual disks and it actually seems
*faster* than a native partition (probably subjective).  i use samba to get R/W
access to my linux homedir. word, excel, powerpoint, IE5, dreamweaver, the cygwin
toolset, emacs, and perl all start quickly and run normally.  the only lingering
problems are mouse tracking, sound support, and some display update glitches.

in general, virtual mouse tracking feels sluggish while the virtual keyboard
and disk seem normal.  if you turn on X mouse acceleration (i run with
a 5/1 ratio triggered by a move greater than 2 pixels) the virtual mouse 
frequently makes huge screen jumps.

i turned on sound support, but it is *slow*.  e.g. playing the boot jingle
made things crawl.  when playing random wav files, it played a few seconds
of sound, paused, sound, paused, etc.  eventually i turned sound support
off.

occasionally the display update leaves small stale rectangles which go away
if covered and uncovered.

other than that, it's been great.  it would be fun to have an gnuserv-style
stub that let you invoke the ms office suite on documents in the host linux
file system.  actually, i wonder if gnuserv works under NT emacs?  hmm...

/mark