Hey look, it's a train-of-thought style post,

OK so now that I know I'm not going to run Vista ever, I should start planning to move away from XP, to linux (or MacOS I guess). I have been recently motivated by a hard drive crash and I'm taking the opportunity to switch earlier than I thought I would. Here is what I'm thinking so far, tell me if it makes sense or am I on crack:

1. I'm going to run CentOS (it's RHEL), because I'm very familiar with it on web servers I admin. I crossed off Ubuntu because it's Debian based and I'm a red hat guy. I crossed off Mandriva because I heard it's veering away from rhat so much that RPM's don't work anymore.

2. I'm going to need to run VMWare and XP. Because most commercial apps aren't written for linux (and given the attitude of most of the linux community, they won't be any time soon). So here's my plan for that:

a) I've got dual 20" monitors, and I'm thinking I could run XP on VMWare in the right screen, with the window full-screen mode. With my centos underneath and left sceen.

b) I have 3.5 gigs of ram, so I would give XP like a gig of memory and leave the rest to CentOS.

c) This would also allow me to gradually transition from XP apps that I know to linux equivalents, that I don't. Of course I'll always need to have XP running because of the commercial app thing, *sigh*.

What do you think of my plan? I've never run vmware before. Is it pretty much as fast as running XP normally? Like, could I run games, for example? Or is it slow like using XP over VNC...

p4 2.8/3.5ram

thanks,
rw

Wow. Nice troll.

I have Windows XP as my main OS and I run Linux in VMware. No, it is not fast enough to run games in VMware. I have an Nvidia 7800GS video card and I can barely play some of those OpenGLx games in Linux in VMware. The thing is that VMware uses virtual hardware. Therefore it uses its own graphics card, sound card, NIC, hard drive, etc... None of it is real and is meant to simulate the hardware.

Performance wise, VMware is slower than running an OS natively. What I would do is swap your plan. Run WinXP/Vista natively on the hard drive so you can play video games and run commercial apps. Then run CentOS in VMware for other uses. That's what I have been doing and it works great. I have 3 monitors.

Hmm that's an interesting setup. I'm trying to avoid Vista, and linux is a better OS in terms of stability, etc. If I ran Win as my main OS and linux in vmware, I'd probably never use the linux screen. Right now I have a linux server on my lan, and I use that through putty for command line shell stuff.

I dont actually need to run games, but I might want to use 3d apps like 3DStudio, and I'd want to run adobe apps like photoshop, illustrator, flash ide.. etc. If I could do that through vmwared XP then that might be good enough.

Yes, you could run apps like Photoshop, illustrator, etc... in WinXp in VMware. Performance is slightly degraded, but not bad. It may also depend on your apps and what hardware they are looking for. For example, if you are doing some intensive 3D stuff like CAD, then you might have some performance problems with the graphics. Again, VMware uses its virtual hardware. I am not aware of it being able to use your $800 Nvidia 8800GTX video card.