Hi there!

I am trying to decide which guest OS to run inside of my Virtual PC 6.1.1 on my Mac (Powerbook 1.5ghz). It would be used for demos of an enterprise network solution only to run the server for the solution (app and MySQL). I don't need to run a GUI in that Guest OS since the Mac can connect to internal virtual PCs from it's own GUI web browsers. RAM for the Mac (the host side) is not an issue now that I found a cheap supplier that got me 2GB for a very good price. Unfortunately, I just found out that Virtual PC for the Mac tops out at 512mb max to be assigned to a guest OS. Blame Microsoft for that one! :-)

The kink in the plan is that the app is a server app that requires 1GB of RAM to run (includes JBOSS, Apache, MySQL, etc.) , but can technically be used for demos at 512mb - but RAM would be at a premium.

As a result, any thoughts on whether Red Hat Adv. Linux or MSFT Windows XP, 2000, or 2003 would function better as a server in 512mb (with MySQL and a JBOSS app with Apache, etc.) would be appreciated.

My original thoughts are that the battle would be between 2000 Workstation and Linux since XP and 2003 are both bloated with a lot of extra stuff that the networking app doesn't need. Additionally, since no GUI is necessary on the Guest box, only the app as a server, I was thinking that Linux might be the fastest since it can be run in command line only mode and thus save the weight of the GUI (of course, my experience with Linux is much more limited than Windows).

Suggestions? Thoughts?

Thanks,
Eric

P.S. I realize this is a Linux site and I will probably get a number of responses slamming Windows, but I would still value the input! :-)