If you're like most of the world, you only care to have one OS (Windows or Linux, etc) on your PC at a time. But what if you want to play with two or more OSes on the same computer? One solution is to dual-boot. I tried that a while back, with little difficulty. But a recent meltdown of Windows on my laptop forced me to reinstall everything (from restore discs) - so - bye bye Linux for now. I have a need to re-install Ubuntu, but the dual boot solution will not suffice as I'm going to be demo'ing it on a network that will only play with Windows boxes (security feature). What's a poor Ubuntu cheerleader to do? Enter Virtual Machines......... (read more in the comments)
No monthly fees, no equipment to install
Friday, July 28, 2006
Virtual machines (they're all the rage)
If you're like most of the world, you only care to have one OS (Windows or Linux, etc) on your PC at a time. But what if you want to play with two or more OSes on the same computer? One solution is to dual-boot. I tried that a while back, with little difficulty. But a recent meltdown of Windows on my laptop forced me to reinstall everything (from restore discs) - so - bye bye Linux for now. I have a need to re-install Ubuntu, but the dual boot solution will not suffice as I'm going to be demo'ing it on a network that will only play with Windows boxes (security feature). What's a poor Ubuntu cheerleader to do? Enter Virtual Machines......... (read more in the comments)
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I had 2 routes to choose here, the (now) free Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and VMWare. VMWare presented its own
challenges, because although VMWare Player is free, it doesn't allow you to create a VM, only use an existing one. So I was going to have to steal... err borrow a copy of VMWare Workstation to create my Ubuntu VM, then play it on the free Player - hoping it works.
I tried the MS offering first. Hurdle one was the fact that Virtual PC only allows a VM access to physical RAM and I had less than 256MB left over. It made for a 2 hour Ubuntu install. I had to install Ubuntu in safe graphics mode, then hack some settings post-install for it to display well. Buying more RAM improved things a little, but I was anxious to see if
VMWare performed any better.
It did. But I had to deal with a small obstacle first. I didn't want to pay for VMWare Workstation just to try an experiment, so I registered to get a 30 day trial key. Then I created my Ubuntu image. With VMWare, I didn't have any of the issues as in VPC - it just worked. Once the image was created, I uninstalled Workstation and installed VMWare Player. And it was that easy. I had assumed that once the image was created, it would remain static in Player. Wrong
again. All of the changes, updates, etc. are maintained. I now have a working, evolving Ubuntu install running from within Windows. Friends tell me if I want to try that again, not to bother with Workstation - just to get the (now free) VMWare Server to create future images if needed.
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