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November 19, 2004
Speaking of Microsoft and Linux
I recently installed Microsoft's Virtual PC Trial on my WinXP machine in order to run Fedora 2 Linux in a window simultaneously. I have to say, it works pretty well! The idea is that you're running two PC's at the same time... one master and one slave - in my case the slave being the "virtual PC" running Linux.
Do not be deceived -Microsoft bought this fine piece of software from Connectix less than a year ago. I suppose Microsoft would prefer that users purchase Virtual PC, so that they can purchase additional licenses of Windows to run as the virtual machines. I suspect that they're not too keen on people checking out Linux in the safety of their comfortable Windows environment. I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to disable this ability...
A competing product I also tried was VMWare Workstation 4.5. I had problems installing Fedora 2 in this environment. I almost got it to work, but failed to get my display configuration settings to work consistently. Truth be told, Virtual PC was a breeze to set up, so I gave up on VMWare for the time being. The good thing is that if M$ kills Linux in VPC, there's a competitor to pick up the slack!
The best way to run VMWare though, is to install Linux on your PC, then install Windows to run as virtual machine inside it. I tried this as well, and found the performance to be pretty good on my virtual Windows machine! My strategy is to take this in steps. My main platform will remain Windows XP until I migrate the majority (51%) of my computing tasks to Linux. Then I will switch.
A co-worker of mine showed me his setup, Fedora 2 using VMWare to run WindowsXP... this is initially what got me excited enough to try it for myself. He *also* showed me Mac OSX running on his system using the PearPC emulator... albeit quite slowly. If Linux will let me run all three of my favorite operating systems on a single machine... I'd think that I died and had gone to heaven.
Posted by Steve Warren at November 19, 2004 4:17 PM
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