Hello, I was sitting here thinking and I have stuff hooked to this machine that will only work under windows (not software, My police scanner being one). I thought it would be neat if when you boot linux you could at the same time be booting windows in the background and just VNC into it. What I mean is have no GUI for windows but have it there just running in the background then be able to VNC into with maybe 127.0.0.2 or something. Just an idea I would have no idea how to work but this would be great in my opinion.

Why not just use VMWare?

Because I already have windows installed and working to perfection. To use up more harddrive room to install it for one task or two maybe would be a waste to me. This could run you already installed os. I think this would be neat. Plus it could be there just waiting without having to launch an app to boot it and so forth. Just a random thought, but I think it would be neat!

I don't think that will work particularly well. An operating system expects to have full control of the hardware (it does things like set the programmable interrupt controller, send low level commands to disks, etc). You'd need to use some sort of virtualization. Maybe one way to try and make it work would be to have something lioke Xen be able to boot a Windows instance from an existent installation. I'm not sure how hard that would be, though. I agree, though, that for now it's probably easiest to just plan to use VMWare,

You say your Scanner is hooked into windows but you say not software... Do you use software to control your scanner or are you refering to just recording the output or making use of the discriminator? I have had many computer cotrolled scanners like the Sony SC1PC and the BC895. It has been awhile and i really only used the windows software because it allowed me to make use of Trunking and regular scanning at the same time.

I know there is Linux SW available for what your probably looking for but you'll just have to do a little research...

KC

My scanner is realy new (like been out only a month). I have checked out the linux choices I have and found none. Will wine let me run something written in VB? If it will I will try to emerge wine and see if I can get my control software to work. Seems to me since my software has to read/write using the serial port there might be a problem using it in linux?

It would be nice if we could boot multiple OSes at the same time but it would require hardware level virtulization, something that I think is in the works for x86. But what you can do right now is emerge in the vmware demo and use that to boot your current install of windows.

When setting a new virtual machine in window check out the advanced menu, you can select to use a physical drive or partition for use in your virtual machine. If you select the windows partition you will beable to boot your current install of windows. The one catch is that since windows will detect a hardware change you will need to do a repair install of windows. You won't lose any data this way, your replacing the system files and what not.

You may want to look into a VB for Linux... It might work...
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/187/

Also you may want to try installing the SW through wine... Not just running it from your windows drive but doing an install... It may work or not but can't hurt.

KC

SUN makes a spark destop that has an intell chip on a coprocessor card
look like they thought it would be usefull as well