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Monday, September 11, 2006

for all those people who want to enjoy windows environment but still want to install linux.... U can use VMWARE.....

first of all thanks to my Best Friend Jagtesh singh Chadda (Jaggu) who enlightened me on this topic...

VMWare runs Windows inside Linux, and it works ...very well too



If you switch to Linux and get rid of Windows, your computer will run without crashing and will be immune to all the problems that plague Windows. But let's be real. You'll have another set of problems to deal with.

You won't be able to run any of your Windows software. You won't be able to run Microsoft Money or Quicken. You won't be able to run Microsoft Word or Excel, or any of the thousands of other good Windows programs.

You'll have a lot of good Linux software to choose from, but sometimes there is no substitute for the stuff you're used to.

An easy way around this is to create a dual-boot PC. When you install most modern versions of Linux, you can set aside space on your hard drive for Linux while keeping everything the way it is for Windows. When your PC boots up, you can choose one or the other. That way, you can reboot when running Linux and come up running Windows. This is ideal for anyone who plays a lot of Windows games, because Windows is a wonderful operating system for games.

But a dual-boot PC won't let you run Windows programs while you're running Linux. To do that, you need VMWare.

VMWare, from a California company with the same name, lets you run the entire Windows operating system inside a window on your Linux PC. While your PC is running Linux, you can click over to your Windows desktop and work in Excel or check your finances with Microsoft Money. You can run Outlook Express or Family Tree Maker or any other Windows program. You can do this while continuing to run all your Linux software, too. Windows becomes just another program in Linux.

After running VMWare for many weeks on my main Linux PC, I'm convinced it's about as close as you can come to a miracle this side of Heaven. It ran every normal Windows program I installed -- I didn't try any major games, but I ran all my standard software -- and VMWare hardly slowed down my Linux PC at all.

You'd probably think I'm exaggerating when I describe what VMWare does, so let me give you a short list.

VMWare:

-- Can run many copies of Windows on one PC, all while Linux is doing its normal functions, without requiring a reboot. In other words, you could have Windows 98 and Windows 2000 running separately from each other in your Linux PC.

-- Keeps the Windows operating system and all Windows programs isolated from Linux. A crash in Windows has no effect on your PC.

-- Connects the Linux and Windows operating systems to each other by a virtual network within the PC. No networking card is needed.

-- Allows quick cut-and-paste operations between Windows and Linux.
VMWare costs $100 for individuals or $300 for businesses. You can download a free trial copy or find out more about VMWare from the company's Web site at http://vmware.com/ . The company also sells a version of VMWare that uses Windows NT or Windows 2000 as the host operating system, but I didn't try that version. (Because Windows is less stable than Linux and because Linux is free, I can't recommend the NT version of VMWare. If you want to run VMWare, install Linux first.)

VMWare works by creating one or more virtual machines (VMs) inside the Linux operating system. A virtual machine is something that acts just like a real thing -- in this case, a PC -- while not existing at all except as a software program. In VMWare, each virtual machine acts like a totally separate computer. These virtual machines can run any version of Windows -- from Windows 3.1 to Windows 2000 -- and they can also run other PC operating systems such as Linux or the PC version of Sun's Solaris.

VMWare could be described as a PC emulator or Windows emulator, but that's not what it is. PC emulators do all their work in software, but VMWare takes advantage of a function of the Intel computer-chip design that allows the creation of a virtual machine within the processor. The virtual computer VMWare creates uses the PC's peripherals and hardware directly, just as a normal PC would. Because of the advanced multitasking of Linux, VMWare is able to make Windows run smoothly without slowing down anything on the Linux side.

Your PC needs a lot of memory -- 128 megs is the minimum for normal operation, although 96 megabytes would be OK if you can't add more at the moment -- and it needs a fast processor. My experience running VMWare on my cousins 450 MHZ Pentium II showed that you need all the speed you can get. His processor actually runs at 464 MHZ (I turned up the speed slightly), but this didn't help boost VMWare much.

My guess is that a 500 MHZ Pentium III PC would give a virtual PC speed of 100 MHZ to 133 MHZ. If this seems to be a big loss in speed, keep in mind that all other operations on the Linux PC are unaffected. I saw no perceptible loss in the speed of most other operations in Linux when Windows 98 was running in VMWare.

...so give it a try

regards...
thesolutionprovider