[SGVLUG] Wine or VM

[bb.odenthal at gmail.com]

Claude,

I have a similar situation and VM works quite well.  In fact I've been running that successfully for many years now.  It's stable and I'm comfortable with it so I haven't pursued other VM technologies such as Xen or the like.  

While I've gone through several incarnations of HW, currently I run a WinXP guest VM using VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. My laptop is an older Dell D610 Pentium M @ 1.7Ghz and 2GB RAM. While it's a modest device, I have run as many as four guest VMs (WinXP, Linux, Live CD, etc) each with 256MB of virtual memory without taxing the host system too much.  

I regularly VPN into work using the WinXP guest and I use Internet Exploiter for various administrative duties, testing, accessing our company portal, etc.  My VM also has M$ Office, Firefox, Wireshark, Putty and a plethora of other applications I need.  All run as if they were naitive with the exception of some video apps which can be choppy at times depending on frame rate/size.  As a side note I really enjoy the USB and serial support that VMware offers.  

My company has many M$ dependencies so that setup has allowed me to "survive" doing work using Linux as my primary OS. On the other hand, licensing all of those is quite expensive. Fortunately I didn't have to shell out the funds to cover it.  

I admit that I am a coffee addict so my next dream machine will undoubtedly be a MacBook Pro running OSX with VMware Fusion for all of my guest OSes. Can't wait! 

-bb
------Original Message------
From: Claude Felizardo
Sender: sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net
To: SGVLUG Discussion List.
ReplyTo: SGVLUG Discussion List.
Subject: [SGVLUG] Wine or VM
Sent: Feb 12, 2009 00:16

Here's a somewhat related question regarding VPN and Wine.

I normally run Linux on my desktop at work but I have to use IE to
access the corporate website for doing expense reports, etc.  Rather
than rebooting into WinXP to do the monthly stuff, I either bring in
my laptop which is also setup for dual boot or wait till I get home
where I can use the winXP machine but there's usually other stuff I'd
rather do.

I've been contemplating installing either WINE or a VM but wondering
which solution is best.  Would running winXP via VM be too much for a
2.8 GHz Dell Optiplex GX280 (single core with hyper threading I
believe) with only 1 GB of memory?   Or I could try Wine but would I
use the windoze VPN client or would it be able to access the client
running on Linux?  I pretty much would only need to run IE though
actually I'd need to run MS Office as well - can't use OpenOffice as
there's always some kind of incompatibility problem one way or the
other.


claude