On 8/3/2010 8:10 AM, Scott Robbins wrote:
>
>>
>> VMware on the best machine you have and run the OS in question as a guest. In
>> many cases you can find an image already installed that you can just download
>> and run under VMware player. If you have to build your own, you'll probably
>> want the latest version of vmware server 1.x that you can find (the 2.x versions
>> have a problem running under Red Hat or Centos and nobody likes the web based
>> console).
>
> Aha---have you tried the latest VMwareplayer? It seems to be their
> replacement for the old VMwareserver. It now enables you to install an
> O/S, so these days, I'm recommending it over VMware server--like you
> (and most people), I greatly dislike the 2.x way of doing things.
>
> There is also the lighter, and at this point, probably less feature-ful
> VirtualBox, of course. However, VMwareplayer, like the old VMware
> server (that is, 1.x) allows you to install a wide variety of systems.
I do have a fairly recent player on an XP laptop but hadn't explored the
new features since I usually start by copying an image created on a
faster machine under vmware server. But the main reason for having a
recent version installed is that it handles USB drives nicely, giving
you a choice of whether they attach to the host or guest and at the time
I couldn't get that to work at all with VirtualBox even though the docs
said it should. I find it very handy to be able to connect
linux-formatted drives through a usb cable adapter that handles
ide/laptop/sata drives and access the content without having to boot
into linux - with the potential to do disaster recovery restores from a
backuppc disk image.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com