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[jgreen]

. . That's about all I know.  Can you smart people supply the rest of the info?  How do I do this?  What do I download?  Is it fully/easily reversible when I lose interest in it next week?  Is doing this pretty much the same (only somewhat slower) than turning my laptop into a dual-boot machine?  (I don't want to turn my laptop into a dual-boot machine.)  Help!

[jgreen]

Okay, I downloaded the VMware player and I'm currently downloading Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, but downloading is something I already know how to do.  What do I do with this stuff when it shows up on my hard drive? 

[jgreen]

First of all, a big "thank you" to all of you knowledgeable folks who chimed in with info.  I was swamped by the volume of responses!

Secondly:  Lacking any hint of a coherent game plan, I set about futzing with this on my own.  Here is what I did, and why i ended up doing a Windows Restore an hour later:

--Like I promised, I downloaded the VMware Player.  i had hoped to install and run linux-based programs out of this app, but that in itself appears to be fantasy.  As best as I can figure, you can't actually INSTALL anything to the player, at least that it will remember the next time you load the player.  Smart People:  please confirm or deny this suppostion.

--I went looking for linux to run on this Player of mine (free downloads become "mine" the moment they hit my hard drive).  I first started downloading Fiesty Fawn (and a big thank you for not being on 5 CD's), but as I read more about this stupid little player of VMware's (stupid things are other people's property and/or fault), the hopelessness of it began to dawn on me.  I needed a "linux appliance" to run on the player, or else the darn thing's just going to sit there looking at you, daring you to make the first move.  Afain--right or wrong?

--The VMware site features a jumble of links to such appliances, and I chose one pretty much at random.  "Linux Mint" got the nod, mostly because it said "linux" and was under my mouse cursor.  "This must be the one!" I shouted gleefully, since NONE OF YOU came up with a better one.   

--Well, a "linux appliance" is really such a linux live demo CD image preconfigured to run inside the player window.  As such, it loads a honkin mess o'stuff into RAM, which is the only thing on a laptop in shorter supply than disk space.  Recall, the only reason I wanted to do it this way (other than sheer impulsiveness) was to conserve laptop resources while getting linux capabiliy.  PSHAW!  (Appologies to G. B. Pshaw)

--Worse yet, this dingleberry hung on to the RAM like a, well, like a ram-hog.  So that's where the Windows Restore came in, thankfully.

Smart Folks:  Where is the proper path out?  I want to run linux on my laptop, although only occassionally and not in a mission-critical manner.  Do I:

1.  Try what I did again, only intelligently this time, via Somebody Smart telling me how to do it?

Or,

2.  Do I run a dual boot on my limited HD space, allocating space not just for the program but related data (and necessarily deleting audio tracks to make room).

Or,

3.  Is there a way to run linux completely off a (bootable) USB drive?  I can just pictue a 8 gb thumb drive being plenty for the time being.

There you have it, AFAICT.  Open the floodgates--here come the responses!

[JimH]

Did you quit your day job?

[jgreen]

Yeah, well, they laughed at they Wright Brothers, too.  (I'm talking about Shecky and Morey Wright, who tried to build a wooden bridge to the moon, starting from the top of the Empire State Building.)

[bob]

Sorry to say that I would (and have) run separate partitions. New laptop hard drives are cheap and use less power than most old ones. I just bought a 100 gig 2.5" drive for $60.

I'd make 3 partitions, a windows os partition, a windows data partition and a linux os partition. You can share the data partition between the 2 OS's.

[jgreen]

I take it your shared windows data partition is FAT 32 and not NTFS?  (Thank you for posting.)

[johnnyboy]

Hey - all abit quick with your replies to complain we didn't give tips - we only visit the site, we dont live on it.

Uninstall VMware Player, now go to their website and download VMware Server, its a free download as well and alot better than Player.

Now if you still have Ubuntu on your HD then your all set. When you create your new VM you can mount the Image as a CD Rom drive in the image. When you boot the virtual machine you can choose boot options just like with a real computer. At this point choose CD rom and it will boot from the Ubuntu CD. You can then either choose to just run it from the CD or you can install it - choose to install it.
Lead it through the install process and once it finishes installing you are set - you then have Linux, all be it in a virtual machine which realistically though shouldn't effect anything much your doing unless you want to be using Linux for something pretty demanding.

Its actually all very straight forwards, powerful and works great - I have 5 or so VM's setup at work I use to replicate client environments and also to test software, linux, etc with.

No real need to go to dual boot and its alot more practical to be able to get access to both OS's at the same time instead of rebooting each time you want to use the other one for something.

[jgreen]

johnny, you da boy!

I followed your instructions, and am up and running with ubuntu inside a VMware Server window.  Thank you for your help and your patience.  A few impressions:

--VMware Server is da bomb, totally blowing doors on Player.  Thank you for that heads-up.  For those that may be toying with this same idea, Server is a bigger download (146MB), but much more logical, powerful and even simpler.  It is a snap to install and configure, once you catch on to the idea that you're creating a virtual network through which you will communicate with your virtual machine.   

--Resource drain for the VMware listening service amounts to about 40 MBs of ram and a tiny CPU putter.  This is acceptible to me, although I'd rather free up the RAM completely until I launch the device.  Any tips?

--Configurability of the VM is really spiffy.  That's the point of VM, of course, but since I'm the last guy to catch on to anything, I'd like to spend a moment just appreciating its spiffy configurability and make a bold prediction:  There's a real future in this.  I'm betting that one day server farms will use this to balance resource loads economically!

--In terms of performance within the VM, here's my first impression:  I think the way that the VM and the host machine (my windows session) play nicely with each other under heavy loads is really amazing.  I also think that my results will come close to the ~90% performance factor I remember reading somewhere. 

--HOWEVER, missing in that top 10% is cursor interactivity.  This makes sense to me, as all commands appear to be going through a couple of shell processes before the get to/from the VM. While I have plenty of available CPU in the VM, mouse movements are a bit stilted.  I was thinking of trying out the GIMP, but I'm not sure I can get good enough brush response to make the experience a non-joke.  Any tips?

--All-in-all, a huge home run, and thank you again, j-hombre. 

[glynor]

For giggles, you might want to try out Parallels Workstation.  I don't have it running on any of my PCs, but I do use the Mac version on my MacBook Pro to run Windows in a VM and it works extremely well.  It also enables, in newer versions, graphics acceleration and the "mouse lag" problems are completely gone (3D performance still is useless but that's not really reasonable to ask for at this point anyhow).  Again... I'm not using the Windows product at all, so I can only speak to the OSX version.  It's quite nice though!

Worth a download and a test I'd say.

[bob]

I take it your shared windows data partition is FAT 32 and not NTFS?  (Thank you for posting.)

I have done both. I'm not sure I'd try it with a vista partition though.

[johnnyboy]

a while since I checked in on this forum. Glad to hear it went so well for you jgreen.

Unfortunately - that 'someday' you talk about is already here.
Virtual Machines are here in a BIG way and virtual server farms already exist to all kinds of different extents. One big high powered box with loads of RAM and a huge HD can be split into two VM's with one given all the RAM to be used as a DB Server and the other given most the HD space so that it can be used as for instance a file server. Think about a multi core CPU - can split it into even more machines in future with each VM given a seperate core (cant do this yet but I'm sure its heading this way rapidly, Chips already have Virtualisation features built into them nowdays).

Now let me blow your mind even further, VMware converter I think its called (hard to find but you can find it if you dig around and again free). It can take any machine you specify and, while the machine is still running, copy the whole system and create a VM out of it.

You can take the box your on and create a VM from it and then run the VM of your current machine, inside your current machine.


Want to test some config options, some new software, etc on your box but dont want to risk messing up a perfectly tweaked system? No problem - just create a VM of it, throw on the changes and see how the system runs - if it works apply it to the machine, if not - just click the snapshot and dump all changes you just made and go back to the fresh image to try something new.


it's another whole world of computing and its here and already in heavy use.

[Adam8282]

I use VMWare workstation 6. It's a good for run linux (both 32 and 64 bits) and it supports virtualization (virtual multi processor) and more interesting stuffs.