VMWare Question

OK, so I will be going back to school in Spring of '03 to pursue a CS degree, and they run Linux almost exclusively. So, I figured that I would brush up on my Linux now and beat the rush. In doing so, I go the trial version of VMware to see if it would be something I want to use so I can work with Linux more conveniently, and it seems to be a ridiculously painful and slow process to install RH 7.3 with it. I was just wondering if others have experienced this, and what kind of performance I should expect from running RH in VMware on a Windows PC, and to see if others have run Windows in VMware on Linux. Here's the following specs on my work PC:

Dual 2GHz Xeons
1GB RDRAM
Twin 32GB SCSI drives in RAID 0 (virtual disk is on there)
1 UATA-100 100GB drive
16x DVD-ROM
40x24x40 Plextor CD-RW

Personally, I'd recommend you just partition off a section of the HDD and install RH into that. The installer will handle the partitioning automatically (just make sure you tell it to use the free space!) and you'll be right. That will give you the highest level of performance.

However you might not want to do that so lets look at the issue at hand. Even though the emulation is a hardware intensive process you should at least be able to extract a decent level of performance out of a machine like that. Have you tried assigning the VMWare process to the least used CPU?

Yeah it took a while to install on my machine too (I think - it was a while ago) but once it was done, it worked fast enough for everything that I needed.

In fact it was fast enought for me to consider using Linux all the time in full screen mode, to try and ween myself off of Windows but still giving me access for games etc.....

...no worries though. I slapped myself around a bit and came to my senses

Windows4ver!

Try the Trial of Connectix Virtual PC and see if that is faster for you....but I doubt it.

Fuck Windows. As soon as everything I need is replicated under Linux (and with WineX it's *almost* there) I'm off. Once I get my new system in a few months with a bigger HDD I'm going to start tinkering with Slackware. XP will hopefully be the last version of Windows I ever use.

As others have noted, I also experienced a painfully slow install, however, after it was installed, it ran ok on my P4 2.26.

Trouble is, last time I tried, Red Hat (admittedly, version 7.2 not 7.3) wouldn't even install under VPC. I was using 4.2 though, 5 may improve things a bit.

At first, Linux installed but wouldn't boot up. I am reinstalling it now after deleting all of the related files and directories.

As for Windows, while I really like their servers (and AD) and many of their applications, the revised licensing scheme is complete bull$hit and Palladium is just the last straw. Since I will be spending the next 4 years at night working with Linux for school projects, I damn well better be able to migrate off of this platform and move to (and with any luck be able to contribute to) the Linux community.

OK, now I finally got RH booted, but it doesn't like my monitor settings so it will not start Gnome. Anybody have any input? I am going to check VMware's site to see if they have anything on this as well, but if someone has the quick answer I'm all ears...

Ahh I remember having a tough time with that myself.. The VMware tools package supports higher resolutions, but when you install RH, you need to choose either "Default VGA" or something to that general effect. Then install the rpm for the vmware tools. Hope that helps, best of luck.

Have you installed the VMWare extensions (or whatever the hell they're called)? I remember digging them up for someone else a while back, let me see if I can find them again.

VM Tools and they come with it now. It'll say in the status bar that you should install them and that can be done via one of the menu options.

If you look into either VMs help or FAQs on site, it'll explain how to set up X.

here we are:

Installing VMWare Tools (Contains links to the tools themselves):
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws3/doc/ws31_newguesta11.html#

Installation Guidelines for Red Hat 7.1 and 7.2 (7.3 shouldn't be all that different):
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws3/doc/ws31_guestos17.html#1015511

Sweet! The directions was what I needed, imagine that...

vmware worked great for me for my orignal testing of .NET
that is all i ever used it for. THe performance was much beter once I installed the drivers from vmware inside the .NET install. I am not sure if the they have drivers that accelerate the performance of linux as well but they probably do.

Yep. I am looking at database/application development, but more focused on web applications. I am tired of part of my job being PC/application support (PC Janitor). I have one degree in electronics already, so I figured I might as well get this one since I have been doing it long enough.