On Monday 19 January 2009 12:09:41 pm Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Adam Jimerson
wrote: On Sunday 18 January 2009 10:30:29 pm Jonathan Ervine wrote:
You can quite happily run a Xen kernel with an nVidia graphics card. Using the proprietary nVidia binary blob as a graphics driver won't work however.
Is there a way to get XEN to use a driver compatible with it, while my normal Kernel still uses the proprietary driver? This machine is not a server, but I need to VM windows for school (the program we use won't work under WINE due to its dependency on .net framework) and I have played with VMware and VirtualBox and wasn't to happy with them. This machine has a AMD Athon 64 x2 at 2.3 Ghz with 3 GB or RAM I'm sure it can handle XEN.
Just an FYI:
Here at work, I switched my desktop to Linux a little over a year ago. I have tried a few VMs to run the few Windows Apps I have to have, but mostly VMware Server and Code Weavers (the $$ version of wine).
I was unimpressed with the speed of both. A few months ago I tried doing a remote desktop to a WIN2008 server and using that as my "Windows Desktop". That has worked great for me since then and I now rarely use a VM on my Linux Workstation. If I do, it is code weavers just because it integrates into Linux so well.
We already had the MS server setup, so it was basically a zero effort setup.
I know I'm going against the grain, but at this point, I think keeping a real MS machine around and using RDP to run your windows apps is the best choice.
FYI: I don't know which MS OSes support RDP. I've only accessed servers that way, so I know Win2003 / Win2008 both support 2 simultaneous remote users plus the one local user. I'm not the only one doing this, so I actually need to find out what it would cost to add more simultaneous terminal service users to that server. Anyone happen to know. FYI: We do not have any kind of volume purchase agreement with MS.
Greg
The problem with that is I don't have any spare machines that I could do that with else I would not be in this situation. Code weavers is also not an option, I downloaded it the day that released it for free due to the lame duck challenge and it also didn't work because of the .net framework. Also from what I hear from others that have tried but this program does not play nice over RDP or VNC.