Okay. I’ve just gotta say it. I am VERY impressed with vmware3. =:)

For my work, there are certain things for which I simply have to use the below-discussed Micro$oft Operating (?) Systems. And I’ll be danged if I’m actually going to have to work inside the thing. That I simply can’t stand. I can’t explain it. Write it off to another one of those nutty UNIX geek things or paranoia or something. But I can’t stand being forced to work completely inside the confines of anything Microsoft dishes out.

Anyway. So along comes the question… how do you do that? Especially when your job says that you have to work with Windoze. Well, you find an emulator that lets you do whatever you want, wherever you want. =:)

For the last year or so, I’ve not needed much more than the basic Windoze apps for my work. You know, like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, TopStyle Lite, Flash, Office, Oracle for Windoze, Acrobat, etc., etc. And for these simple apps, there’s a VERY good emulator that lets you run virtually any application for Windows95/98 inside Linux. It’s called Win4Lin. Since October 30, 2000, I’ve been using it, and like I said, it’s EXTREMELY good. The only hiccup I’ve hit recently is that I’m now needing to develop applications for my job for the win2000/winxp environment–and I need to do this from a win2000 or winxp environment. Well, this is not what Win4Lin is intended for. Win4Lin lets you run Windows apps in Linux. It does it well–it’s quite honestly the best thing there is for the majority of people needing to do this. It costs around 1/4th as much as vmware–and that’s not a fair comparison, really, it’s not, because vmware is a totally different animal.

So, long story short, if you’re needing to run Windows applications in Linux, go with Win4Lin. I am still extremely happy with them.

However, there are times when you need more than that. And for that, there’s vmware.

I won’t go into the gory details of what vmware is–go check out their site on your own. They obviously would do a much better job of it anyway. But briefly, vmware allows you to run an entirely separate machine (and as many of them as you want) inside an existing machine. And inside that/those machine/machines, you can run just about any Intel-based operating system that you desire. So, in my PIII 700 laptop with 256 megs of RAM, I run my real operating system (debian). Then, I have 3 virtual machines that exist on my debian-based linux filesystem (XFS of course). I could have more if I wanted, but 3’s all I need. And inside those 3 virtual machines, I have win2000, redhat 6.2, and Mandrake 8.1 running.

And it’s FAST!!!! =:)

I’ve played around with vmware1 and vmware2 before. And they’ve both been very slow. But vmware3 is incredible. I kid you not–my little PIII 700 laptop with 256 megs of RAM runs debian linux natively on the XFS filesystem. And I have oodles of things going on with it, including Oracle instances, Apache web servers running, and other neato stuff. And then I bring up my vmware/win2000 instance inside my X session and the responsiveness that it offers rivals a “real” machine running win2000 natively.

Love it. =:)