[Gloucs] adobe software

[A. S. Budden]

On 11/05/07, Maximillian Murphy <m at de-minimis.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 May 2007 23:51:34 +0100
> Pete Wright <r3t39 at hotmail.com> runed:
>
> > Has anyone successfully got any adobe/macromedia products running
> > under linux, pref. ubuntu. As a website developer i tend to use
> > macromedia flash and adobe photoshop at work, and sometimes the
> > same here at home. I'm also a hardcore World of Warcraft player, i
> > have researched and discovered that WoW can be run in linux. the
> > only thing that is keeping me attached to windows is the need for
> > windows based programs that aren't native to linux :( which is such
> > a shame as linux has so much power.
>
> Alas I don't know of something that will do this.  If I had to do it myself (and didn't have six+ machines at home) I'd look at one of the virtualisation products out there and run a copy of windows inside a virtual box on linux.  Why sweat trying to get a windows app to run on linux?  (By all means write to Adobe and ask them to ship for linux as well!)
>
> I haven't got round to playing with virtual machines yet but it's been on my todo list for a while.  There's all the more reason to do so now with better virtualisation support in the new AMD and Intel cores.  Parallels and vmware seem to me to be the two front running x86 virtualisation programs, for this kind of application anyway.  Vmware is the more highly regarded of the two but it's also quite expensive.  Parallels was something like 35 GBP the last time I looked.  Given that security isn't going to be an issue you can probably get away with using an old windows system.  I don't know about your adobe programs' OS requirements are but you might well find that win98 is the best bet coz it's old and has a comparatively small memory footprint - significant when you have two operating systems sharing the resources of one machine.  Happy me.  I know a nathing about windows & haven't used it even once in over a year, and then only under protest.
>
> If you go down the virtualisation route, can I come & play too? ;)

I've used vmware fairly extensively and have just started playing
around with virtualbox.  The latter seems very good and (if you can
use/buy the "free for non-commercial use" version rather than the open
source one) you get the benefit of shared folders, which is currently
not present in vmware player (you have to pay for the workstation
version for that).  You can use the free vmware player quite easily:
there are loads of methods for making virtual machines without using
the full workstation package (based mainly on qemu I believe).
Alternatively (assuming this is still available), you could download
the trial version of vmware workstation, use it to make the virtual
machine and then use vmware player to run the thing.

I use Windows 2000 in a virtual machine and have found it to be very
responsive: easily good enough (with 512MB RAM allocated to the VM) to
run either Coreldraw or either of a couple of CAD packages.  I also
have a Ubuntu virtual machine at work for when Cygwin just can't cut
it.

Hope that is of some interest/help.

Al