Vmware With XP and Linux
 

Hello does anyone know how to run Mandrake Linux 9.1 with VMware? i want WinXP to be my main System and i want to run linux on it. How would i install linux so it dosnt install the boot loader and so it works with VMware? I have 3 hard drives two for winxp and one for Mandrake. I just dont want to overwrite my winxp bootloader can someone please help or give me a link to a tutorial? thank you!

If you're installing Mandrake within VMWare then you should have nothing to worry about. If, however, you are going to be using a whole harddisk for your installation, why not install it direct and not in VMWare? Or is it so that you can use it from within Windows? It will run much smoother when running natively.

On the VMWare web page Mandrake 9.1 is not on the list of supported operating systems but Mandrake 9.0 is. I am also interested in possibly using VMWare but have a similar problem, I use Red Hat 9. Various versions of Red Hat are supported but Red Hat 9 is not. The latest version of Red Hat works best on my computer, so I need to use that. Below is a link to the webpage that lists currently supported host operating systems and guest operating systems:

http://www.vmware.com/products/deskt...cs.html#hostos

I would like to use RH9 as the host and as the guest operating systems I would like to use Win NT 4.0, DOS and some other Linux distro. My only experience with using VMware was in a class I took where Win XP was used as the host operating system and Red Hat 7.3 and Win 2K were the guest operating systems. We gave each OS its own IP address and ran them all simutaneously and networked them as if they were on seperate computers. I hope that the version that uses Linux as a host will work as well! I am a part-time student and as a student with a student ID card can get VMware for half price. I am just waiting for them to get around to supporting RH 9. I already happen to have an extra copy of Win NT 4.0 and DOS which which I hope to use as guest operating systems. If anyone has tried using RH 9 with VMWare let me know.

I plan to still leave all the other operating systems on my harddisk and will still use them. I do not plan to use VMware instead. I want to occasinally run more than one OS at once and quickly and easily jump back and forth between each. I would not do it that way all the time of course, just when I have a reason to.

I just noticed that the original post was about using Win XP as the host. Well that would be like how our computers were configured in that class I took. I did not install the VMWare, however as students we each had to install Red Hat 7.3 as a gest OS. We did not worry about bootloaders. I do not recall all the details but somehow we used VMWare to create an imaginary virtual computer with an imaginary hard drive. We then ran the Red Hat 7.3 installation program and used fdisk to create partitions on the imaginary harddrive. Of course VMWare somehow borrowed space from our real harddrive to create the imaginary virtual harddrive.

I do not recall all the details, but it worked. When booting up, Win XP, the host operating system always came up first. Then if we decided to use RH 7.3, VMWare would have RH 7.3 boot up in a window. It could also be run full screen. We could actually watch RH 7.3 then booting up in the window. If we decided to also use Win 2K, we would boot it up in another window as well. When we were through using each gest OS we would shut each them down before shutting down Windows.

I believe we were using 2 GHz Pentium II computers with 512 Mb of ram and they could run all three operating systems at once very well.

P.S. we may have only had about 256 Mb of RAM, I am not sure.

I also ment to say a Pentium 4 computer not a Pentium II. I did not mean to say that I used a Pentium II running at 2 GHz. Just listen to what I mean not what I say.