Scorecard
As reported earlier, VMWare Server is easy to install on Ubuntu and running Windows XP seems to work well. The question nagged me about running a virtual machine on my Vista laptop. There is no real necessity for this except to be able to demo a Linux system "on the road." Also as noted earlier, running a guest OS on top of Vista would probably be a pretty slow machine. But Linux has no where near the memory requirements of Vista so "slow" may not be much of a consideration. Also, I am seriously considering expanding the laptop memory from 1GB to 2GB. This would speed up Vista and leave plenty of memory for a guest OS.
I attempted to install VMWare on the laptop. This did not go well. There were prerequisites including that Vista have SP! installed!! I had a copy of SP1 but was reluctant to install it because of all the Vista problems. Oh well, what the hell, if I hit a problem I'd get out of it like always. SP1 took a good hour to install with several reboots along the way. When it was finally done I still could not install VMWare.
VirtualBox does install. At this point I will not recommend one program over the other, it's what works on your machine! The two programs are more alike than different and your learning will be how to use a virtual machine either way.
Without too much problem I went on to install Ubuntu in my virtual machine. I hit a big problem. Ubuntu runs okay but only in a small box. Full screen mode could not be achieved.
I have no idea what my next computer will be except that it will not be a Windows box. Dell is currently shipping machines with Ubuntu installed and HP has announced that they will soon be shipping machines with OpenSUSE installed. I wanted to try SUSE.
Round Two..
Remember that the one and only reason my desktop is running Ubuntu is because it is the only distro I could get to install!! I like Ubuntu, you might even call me a "fanboy", but I can't run anything else on this damn machine!! I attempted to install OpenSuse using VMWare. Started okay but after awhile the install simply froze. End of experiment.
Back on the laptop things worked much better. I still wound up with "Linux in a box" but the box was much bigger and acceptable to demo.
All that said, "What about SUSE?" Well, it has fewer pre-installed applications than Ubuntu but all the basics are there and the repositories will contain just about anything you need. If the price is right I would not hesitate to buy an HP with SUSE installed.
I attempted to install VMWare on the laptop. This did not go well. There were prerequisites including that Vista have SP! installed!! I had a copy of SP1 but was reluctant to install it because of all the Vista problems. Oh well, what the hell, if I hit a problem I'd get out of it like always. SP1 took a good hour to install with several reboots along the way. When it was finally done I still could not install VMWare.
VirtualBox does install. At this point I will not recommend one program over the other, it's what works on your machine! The two programs are more alike than different and your learning will be how to use a virtual machine either way.
Without too much problem I went on to install Ubuntu in my virtual machine. I hit a big problem. Ubuntu runs okay but only in a small box. Full screen mode could not be achieved.
I have no idea what my next computer will be except that it will not be a Windows box. Dell is currently shipping machines with Ubuntu installed and HP has announced that they will soon be shipping machines with OpenSUSE installed. I wanted to try SUSE.
Round Two..
Remember that the one and only reason my desktop is running Ubuntu is because it is the only distro I could get to install!! I like Ubuntu, you might even call me a "fanboy", but I can't run anything else on this damn machine!! I attempted to install OpenSuse using VMWare. Started okay but after awhile the install simply froze. End of experiment.
Back on the laptop things worked much better. I still wound up with "Linux in a box" but the box was much bigger and acceptable to demo.
All that said, "What about SUSE?" Well, it has fewer pre-installed applications than Ubuntu but all the basics are there and the repositories will contain just about anything you need. If the price is right I would not hesitate to buy an HP with SUSE installed.
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