Thanks all for the feedback Regards, David On Wed, 2 Jan 2002 14:50:26 +0200, Jaakko Tamminen wrote:

Hi

My spouse uses vmware 2.0 because she has a bookkeeping software, that is not available for Linux.

She has found, that the same win-98 is running more realiable under vmware than when installed on its own.

This might sound strange, but that is a fact.

We have tried to install the same win-98 to a fresh HD, and it really does crash more ofter than under vmware.

Actually under vmware then only thing that does not work always, is that win -98 does not see the shared samba-printer from Linux, so that is not a really crash, but a undocumented feature of M$.

When running pure win-98, system might hang randomly, saved data might not reach the HD, and must be entered again etc...

Performance is no issue here. And actually the HD transfers seems to be as fast as without emulator (data backup/restore), but screen handling is not as fast, but does not affect except maybe gaming... but we don't game!

So in our case, vmware actually makes the use of bookkeeping software more secure and reliable.

Hi David

(4) I have been able to get it to use my linux printer via Samba (Jaakko, you are welcome to have details of my setup if you want).

I believe that my samba setup is ok, as is works all the time. I think that the rare lost of the printer has something to do with win-98, and not samba.. When vmware/win-98 looses the printer, that printer is still visible for other computers (also vmware from my computer)... But this is so rare, that it does not make a difference :-) And I agree to all what You are saying. Vmware is a good emulator, except for gaming. But I believe any emulator is not ment for gaming, as games should be made native to that OS. "I once did a vnc-connection from win-98 to Linux, and vnc back again to win-98... I got really screwed up!" Jaska.

Hi Phil I don't believe that our setup would help... roughly to setup printing with vmware goes like this: Setup the printer to work with Linux. Start samba in Linux, default setup is ok. Run "vmware-config.pl", and let the script set the virtual-networking for You.. (just accept all the defaults). Start vmware. Install Windows. In windows, install new "network printer", browse the shared "samba" printer, give the drivers that windows want. That should be it. If this does not work, can You give us more information what does not work, and how You have tried to set things up. jaska. Viestissä Perjantai 4. Tammikuuta 2002 12:38, Philip Burness kirjoitti:

Can I have a copy of your setup? I have tried forever to get printing working via samba and it just won't do it.

Thanks Phil

On Wednesday 02 January 2002 4:14 pm, you wrote:

...

On Wed, 2 Jan 2002 12:07:54 +0000

David wrote:

...

Since you have to install Win 98 into VMware, and presumably Win4Lin, you are still faced with the same problems you had previously with a plain Win install, plus you have the overhead of the emulator. If this is the case it is probably better to stay with just Win.

I would appreciate some feedback

Hi David,

I run vmware 2.0.10 and I can confirm almost all of what Jaakko says.

More specifically :

(1) I too find it more stable than a native Win 98 installation.

(2) You can save your running configuration so that restart takes only about 3 seconds. I find that very convenient.

(3) I mount the vmware/win drives under linux with samba. Data exchange is very fast and reliable./

(4) I have been able to get it to use my linux printer via Samba (Jaakko, you are welcome to have details of my setup if you want).

(5) It does impose an overhead on the system. You tell it how much memory it can appropriate, and I find that it works best with 128MB. It is also quite heavy on the cpu. This box was, until very recently, a PIII 800 / 384MB and I could definitely tell the difference between with and without a running instance vmware. Performance was not, however, seriously degraded. A couple of weeks ago I rebuilt as a dual PIII 1Ghz smp with 768MB, and vmware now has no impact on speed - I was kind of daring even to try having an impact by building this box ;-)

(6) There are several very helpful newsgroups on vmware's own servers. Most problems get fixed very quickly.

(7) You definintely can't play games. Some other graphics things can be a bit weird - WordPerfect needs to have the right printer installed or else font display is screwed up.

(8) Under vmware 2 you can only have virtual hard drives of 2GB. I think that limit can be exceeded under newer versions.

In summary, I could not run linux as my main system for the purposes of my work without it. It has never let me down.

Regards,

Geoff

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