Linux under NT

Linux under NT with VMWare New software offers intriguing options

Wow! I am running Linux under NT4. I just downloaded and installed VMWare 1.0 (new non-beta commercial release) and installed the >2Meg package. Then I installed RedHat 6.0 on a free drive and added an entry for it in VMWare. Aside from having to do an install in Linux native mode of VM Tools (the guest side of the installation), that was it! About 90 minutes of straightforward, trouble free install time (mostly unattended).

Linux runs in a 1600x1200 16-bit display inside an application window on my NT desktop. I can also run full screen. And when I upgrade to Win2000, Linux will be able to render to the desktop through Direct X (i.e., no sluggishness at all in screen updates). Right now, there is a small hit to Linux - the guest operating system (nothing I can't live with, really) And there is no noticeable hit to NT!

I can see my NT network drive shares from Linux and I ran the Samba server setup (very easy in linuxconf, off the GNOME/Enlightenment Start menu), so now I can see my Linux network shared volumes in my NT network neighborhood! I can browse the Apache web server running on Linux from NT and IIS from Netscape in Linux. This product is really quite acceptable fast. There is really not much of a desktop response performance hit. However, I am sure that running a processor hungry task simultaneously in both OSes would result in molasses. Now you have to get on their case about BEOS so OEMs can conceive of releasing machines in the next couple of years with multiple OSes pre-installed and able to run simultaneously. At 1 GHz, running three OSes will probably be like running each at 500 (I would say Linux as a guest is running like a 200, down from 333 and NT (the host) is running with no noticeable slowdown).

What is VM Ware?
This is NOT an emulator; it is a hardware multiplexing executive. That means that guest OSes actually run on the bare silicon, with all their I/O (disk, mouse, keyboard, NIC, video, etc) running through virtualized devices hosted by the executive software which, itself, runs in the native operating system. Thus, the CPU burst performance of the guest is practically that of the host OS. However, device performance can vary greatly, depending on how well your system devices work with VMWare's virtualization of them. For instance, I noticed considerable performance degradation when accessing floppies and when doing complete screen redraws (for example, when switching between each of RedHat's default of 4 desktops). Hopefully, this will be improved with further releases, as the VM device drivers improve. However, doing CPU bound processing (like unsharp mask in GIMP) is really close to native speed, since it operates primarily on the CPU and in memory (and hence operates like any other multi-tasking program under NT).

As far as support for OSes goes, VMWare is not an emulator, so without a major rewrite, so it can only support Intel versions of OSes. However, adding a new OS to the list is probably a matter of creating some VM drivers for it and and the OSes that will host it. BeOS would be a good candidate.

Conclusion
I am really impressed with the stability and ease of use of this product, considering that this is a 1.0 (and I mean 1.00000 +/- 1E-6) release of this product.
Get it at www.vmware.com.

For Further Reading:

Linux setup tips - How to install VMWare's "VM Tools" when working with the Linux command line.
Red Hat Linux 5.2.2 - a hand-on test.
Red Hat Linux 6.0 - installation tips, etc.

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