Is this good news, bad news or don't care for the Linux world?

After considering the option of paying more money to Microsoft for a full install version of their OS in order to use it with VMware under Linux, I have decided that I will clearly prefer to use Wine... what a great project.

On the other hand, running virtual machines in order to try out various Linux distributions would be a nice way to avoid learning how to multi-boot. Nah. I need to learn how to get multi-boot working.

http://gowest.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/...e-ceo-buh-bye/

WINE won't always be the best solution, and who says that vmware is the only virtualisation program available for Linux? There is also QEmu, and virtualbox, and I'm sure you can do a 'full' installation of windows on those.

Yes, Wine is a good project. But it is far from perfect. There are a lot of programs that do, and do not, work well with it.

There are plusses and minuses to VMs vs. dual-boot.
With VMs, you can have both systems running at the same time, which makes for a great development environment. But they also require more resources than are required in a dual-boot setup, which can lend to slower performance. They can also be somewhat less secure, since they are running in a layer on top of another OS. If the other OS is compromised, the VM can be compromised, too.

With dual-boot you can only run one OS at a time, but each OS gets the full attention of the hardware, and security is as tight as that OS is set up for.

It depends on what you want to accomplish. I run my Linux box full time, with a Windows VM to run my website. I need both running, so VM is my best path. If you've got limited resources (RAM, processor, etc.) your best bet is probably dual-boot.

Here's how I view Wine.. if you have to run Wine, you're better off just installing Windows on a machine to run it. There are plenty of alternatives. Running a program in Wine is like wanting to run a native Linux program in Windows. My two cents!

Have you tried virtualbox OSE (Open Source Edition)?

www.virtualbox.org

It's a great alternative to VMware.

Hi bbneo,

In complete honesty; I'm not really sure how and why you would "pay more money to Microsoft" as a result to Paul Maritz, former MS employee, taking the place as CEO. It would be great if you could elaborate on that.

IMHO, you shouldn't try and learn virtualization as a substitute for multi-booting. Multi-booting is a very good thing to know when setting up and/or trying out different OS's on your PC. It should not, however, be compared with the possibilities and awesomeness of virtualization.

Just a quick example; you could, on a cheap Dell PE1950, setup a Xen dom0 using less than 200MB in RAM and have 4 domU's, guest machines, (provided the box has 16GB or so RAM) with almost 4GB RAM run whatever OS that runs on x86. They would run so extremely close to "bare metal" performance that you in most cases would not notice the machines being VMs.

I am no doubt biased. Xen is totally awesome. It's paravirtualization, with live migration possibilities (transfer a running machine from hardware A to hardware B without virtually any disruptions) and on the fly resource management. There are products out there that do some of the things Xen can do in different aspects, but none have the diversity and most importantly stability and scalability for production use.

Ok, there's VMWare ESX direct on hardware. But compare that to open source Xen..

This is a sensitive subject You should of course go with the option that suits you best. SlowCoder's post hits the sweetspot of what you should consider.

Kind regards,
HUBB

I didn't mean that the CEO change would make me pay more money to MS.

What I meant was that in order to use a virtual machine, you really need a "full install" version of the OS, right?

Most of us have "upgrade" versions of the OS, (mine go back to Win 3.1 and Win 95) which you couldn't install on a virtual machine, right?

bbneo

Well, VMWare does support Windows going all the way back to 3.1, but I am not sure how it would handle upgrades, so it is best to have a non upgrade version of Windows.