[Lancaster] PC virtualisation

[Richard Robinson]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 03:11:25PM +0000, Wayne Ward wrote:
> Yes sounds good 
> Virtual box is just handy really
> Have you looked at vmware they used to do a free version

I also looked at vmware; they still do offer a free version, FSVO.

Finding it on the website is not nice, or helpful, amid all the things you
could give them money for, which kind of looks easier. Funny, that. But
manageable. Installation then blows up. Googling shows that this is a known
problem, solution is to apply a patch, which comes from somewhere else
entirely and is not acknowledged anywhere that I could find on the Vmware
site. There appear to be different versions of this, the most recent of
which was only available from the newsgroup archives, as a post to some
binaries group ... Once obtained, this patch is a chunk of C code, which
holds large buffers of raw unexplained uncommented hex, to which it then
appears to pass control (I may be wrong, I didn't give it a very hard
looking at). I could find no discussion anywhere as to what this does, or
why. It refuses to run except as root.

Having done which, it does seem to work, if you're happy to live with the
implications of the above. Personally, I then wiped my entire disk and
rebuilt a clean system, but I know people who have used it for years, and
profess themselves happy with it, and no ill effects.

It's a Mindset Thing, possibly. I was thinking of a minimal underlying,
base, system, to do virtualisation and not much else, where I would then run
a working system inside a VM - the idea of including X, etc, in the base
system for the sake of virtualisation that can't run without a pointyclicky
interface looked kind of offputtingly clumsy and the wrong way round. <cue
usual cli/GUI stuff, to taste>

Xen looked much more like what I was thinking of, and is the one I would
have pursued, but at that point I observed that I'd spent far too much time
on investigating it, and possession of a new, much-larger hard disk would
actually do what I was wanting without costing me any more time ...

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem