[Xastir-Dev] Re: Xastir for SAR

[Owen DeLong]

Another option would be to jail the micr0$0s0ft applications inside a
package known as vmware (http://www.vmware.org).  I used several earlier
versions of it (until I finally decided I just didn't want to deal
with Wind0w$ any more).  It's pretty clean.  I didn't run into anything
outside of GL-intensive applications that I wasn't able to run with
pretty reasonable performance.  WINE is another alternative, which is
also free, but I haven't had as good luck with WINE.

One advantage to VMware is the "Un-doable" hard drive.  You can actually
install Windows on an image and everytime you shut down the virtual windows
machine VMware will ask you whether you want to commit the changes to
the virtual drive.  What I usually do is put the OS one one drive image,
application software is installed on a second drive image, and all 
changeable
data goes on a third drive.  This way, when I exit most of the time, I
don't commit the changes to drives 1 and 2, and I keep a known stable
environment.  When I install software, I can test the virtual machine
for quite a while (and several reboot cycles, etc.) without committing or
removing the changes.  If things seem stable, I commit the changes.  If
not, I roll them back, and I don't end up in the wonderful world of "You
installed software... You must now reinstall windows."

I'm pretty comfortable running Windows applications jailed under Linux.
Much more comfortable than I would be trying to stick Xastir within
a Cygwin environment.

Owen