email.listen@googlemail.com wrote:
Am Sat, 28. January 2006 16:01 schrieb Maged Hussein:
Hi list,
I'm currently thinking of a way to make OpenSUSE available to much more audience (specially windows users). My target is to attract more users and developers to Linux platform (making it easy for them to make the switch). Upon testing many distros, I found that SUSE has the most windows like experience to Windows users PLUS a very intuitive admin interface for linux power users.
The easiest way is to distribute it within a Computer magazine that all PC users can access.
other options removed...<<<<<
3- Make a vmware image of OpenSUSE with packages relevant to audience. [This approach will eliminate HW support, modem support [vmware can use NATing to hadle this], installation support] There is some packages that essential to Windows user but I don't know what is the obligation if I included them within the vmware image namely: - RealPlayer - Acrobat Reader - Flash - Java - All dependednt parts on them. Of course one can update from yast repositories once installed but Internet Connectivity will not be available to some users.
- Using VMWare will bring a lot more problems you might expect. It is _very_ tricky to offer VMWare images for all kinds of Hardware combinations which could be found out there in the wild. From a technical point of view I would rate this as a unresolvable problem.
For your information, VMWare is there to remove your hardware depenency. VMware offers their own virtual hardware and they provide upwards compatibility. Which is relative easy in a software environment. A VMWare guest always gets the same type of hardware, regardless on what physical hardware it runs.
- Last but most, I would assume that using VMWare images will bring a bunch of legal problems according to the use of VMWare. (If not I would expect that there should still be a lot of those 'official' images.)
If you scan around in the VMWare website, specially around the VMWare player section, you will see VMWare provides this VMWare player specially for the purpose of running those kind of things. To my idea, there can be a VMWare image with the same contents as the Live CD. Come to think of it, using the ISO image, the (diskless) VMWare Player image is relative easy, just dump the next lines in the file 'SuseLiveCD.vmx': ======== config.version = "7" virtualHW.version = "3" memsize = "256" MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE" ide1:0.present = "TRUE" ide1:0.fileName = "SuseLiveCD.iso" ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image" ethernet0.present = "TRUE" usb.present = "TRUE" sound.present = "TRUE" sound.autodetect = "TRUE" displayName = "SuSE Live CD" guestOS = "suse" floppy0.present = "FALSE" ======== Save the above to a file 'SuseLiveCD.vmx' and put the LiveCD image (with the name 'SuseLiveCD.iso'!) in the same directory. Then start VMWare Player and point it to the vmx-file and off you go, all legal. For everyone who wants to play around: VMWare Workstation can be used during a trial period to create a bunch of VMWare guests, that can also be used (beyond the trial period) with the VMWare player. Regards CBee