[Xastir-Dev] Re: Xastir for SAR

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Owen DeLong wrote:

> 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.

Agreed.  I had a license back in the 1.x days of VMWare and loved
it.  I've since converted entirely to Linux on most boxes and have
no use for it, but it was one of the finest commercial packages I've
ever used.  Highly recommended if you need that sort of thing.

I could start up WinNT4/Win95/DOS all concurrently on my Linux box,
and could have run many more at the same time, depending on
processor speed an available memory.


> 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 did another trick:  I installed the OS into VMWare, then copied
the file containing the OS and the config file to a new name.  Then
I could hack on that to my heart's content, and just waste the file
and make a new copy from the clean OS any time I wanted.  It was
very good for testing installs, which I was doing a lot of back
then.


> 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.

Yes.  Agree 100%!

-- 
Curt Mills, WE7U                    hacker_NO_SPAM_ at tc.fluke.com
Senior Methods Engineer/SysAdmin
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math!"
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates!" -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"