Anyone use VMware?

[BlueTsunami]

I'm about to install VMware and a Linux Distro (still not sure what i'm going to use) in Windows XP. I'm all good on the Linux front but i'm wondering about anyones thoughts on VMware vs. Virtual PC and their expereince with VMware in general.

I for one will be happy with being able to work in a Linux environment (doing random things, learning about stuff) while still being certain things in windows (where it would be kind of a hassle in Linux). Seems very convienent.

 

[Crusher]

We used VMWare all the time when I was in school. Assuming you've got a reasonably current gaming PC, you should be fine. If you've got an older computer or an eMachine or something, just remember that VMWare needs a good chunk of memory to run acceptably. Depending on the distro you use, and whether or not you run a window manager like KDE, you may need to allocate a good 300+ MB of RAM for VMWare, on top of whatever Windows and your other applications are using. Running VMWare on a PC with 256MB is not fun.

 

[BlueTsunami]

We used VMWare all the time when I was in school. Assuming you've got a reasonably current gaming PC, you should be fine. If you've got an older computer or an eMachine or something, just remember that VMWare needs a good chunk of memory to run acceptably. Depending on the distro you use, and whether or not you run a window manager like KDE, you may need to allocate a good 300+ MB of RAM for VMWare, on top of whatever Windows and your other applications are using. Running VMWare on a PC with 256MB is not fun.

I'm planning to install on this system

AMD 64 3000+ @1.8GHz
2GB RAM
A whole lot of HDD space

I'm still unsure of how much RAM I will allocate for the other OS but i'm thinking around 500MB?

 

[Rambler]

IIRC VMware suggests recommended RAM size for each of the virtual machines based on what OS it will run (you can change that ofcourse).

 

[BlueTsunami]

Bah! I tried installing a 64 bit version of a Linux distro (Ubuntu 64bit). I then find out that 64 bit emulation on VMware (even the latest) is still experimental (IE: Unstable), the error that was returned was.....

Your CPU does not support long mode please get the 32 bit distrobution

So i'm basically in the process of getting the regular i386 version of Ubuntu. Just to let ya'll know.