March 29, 2008
Paralles? Win4Lin? Have you used them? Are they easy? Which do you think is better? What if windows is already installed?
Discuss.
Qui es mui macho?
28 March 2008 -- Mountain View, CA
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You're right, my query was malformed. Allow me to rephrase.
What I want to do is run Windows XP under Ubuntu. And on the WinXP, I'd like some MS-Office, Matlab, Mathematica, Igor, maybe Tina-pro, ZEMAX, and SolidWorks. Since all that crap is alread installed on the existing WinXP drive, I'd like to be able to "just use it" without having to reinstall everything under the virtuallization environment.
The commodity hardware consists of:
- AMD 1.67 GHz processor (XP2000+ or similar dreck)
- 1.5 Gb ram
- ATI Radeon 7500 based graphix (64 Mb ram, me thinks)
- enough disk space.
Yes, I have done the websearch and read the web stuff. But, the websearch didn't tell me what y'all thought. Thus the posting here.
Oh, also this is to make my life less frustrating and more informational. Also, also, I am interested in doing things with data. A'la InfoChimps.
Hmmm -- that's a lot of windows programs. (Matlab & Mathematica have linux versions, but you'd have to find those of course.) Are you sure WindowsXP + Cygwin isn't the right thing to answer? What do you need from Linux?
I'm pretty dedicated to the Tao of Unix, but as you know I used windows+cygwin until I Switched: it's a perfectly cromulent option.
Also: do you have a faster computer at work / elsewhere that you use? I don't have too much experience with the virtualized software, so I don't know how much it actually slows your jonx down. I've found, though, that a computer only starts feeling slow when you have access to another, faster one, and a virtualized desktop machine will necessarily be slower, flakier and (most importantly) memory-hoggier than native.
The apps you name seem to all be big, burly apps that will want lots of memory and lots of CPU. A 1.6GHz computer with 1.5G ram certainly has a lot of service left to provide, but isn't particularly fast. XP starts to really suffer with <1GB real memory, so you may have to toss in another stick or two.
I bet you have to reinstall everything: the virtualized machine wants its own copy of windows, with its own set of drivers, I think. If so you'll have to run the installers. You could /possibly/ mount your windows disk in the unix env, and set the installers to use the existing-windows-program-files as their install directory. But like I said, the VM will be ever so flakier, and I'd give it a windows install that was as relentlessly cruft-free and orthodox in its setup as possible. If the VM is perfectly happy to boot from the linux-mounted NTFS windows partition, though, then you shouldn't have to reinstall anything.
My main point: if you're going to do something non-standard (such as, still, a VM OS) you can make it work if you a) are willing to invest the time to debug it, b) have a narrow focus of use cases, and c) get it working, never stray from those use cases, and leave the fucking thing alone. 7-10 major apps stretches this; and if you're going to not only use these apps but also other random fiddlefucking I predict sadness.
I think that all the VM solutions still require sandboxing some part of the disk for the VM's use; getting one logical filesystem (so that you can save a file in linux and immediately open it in the VM) may be non-trivial. You can always have each facet treat the other's as network mounts -- but this is one of the many fiddly little tasks that await if you're going to have this be your main, day-to-day setup.
I don't know how far they've come; maybe all these problems have been solved. You should install one of their trial versions and let us know what you find out. My strong suspicion, though, is that VMs are still for jumping into this or that app every once in a while, and not for providing first-class application services and a fungible OS environment.
OMG! Then you can use Paralles to access Windows XP to access you Linux workstation via ThinAnywhere!
Hi!
I am currently running Windows as guest and Red Hat Linux via VMWare on my office desktop. Note that it is a pretty good machine: quad core processor with 4GB Ram. I never think it is slow. In fact, it seems pretty damn fast when I run simulations. I did mount a whole extra hard drive on the Windows partition, but to get the virtual machine up and running you will need to allocate some of your Linux space to it. The extra drive I mounted was a new one, so there weren't any files on it so I don't know if you can run a previously installed executable in a new virtual machine. However, in my opinion, the easiest thing to do with a computer is install software for windows so I imagine reinstalling everything would be a minor hassel. I also have Matlab on it and once again, I don't notice any slow down. I definitely run more than 7-10 apps on it just fine. I rarely if ever notice that the windows machine is virtual; the only exception to that would be using USB devices. If you are using a USB drive in Linux and want to access it in Windows you have to unmount it and physically unplug and replug it in. I would totally recommend trying to run a virtual machine, especially since you can download VMWare's "Server" software for free which will do all that you want.
The minus is that VMWare's customer service SUCKS MONKEY BALLS. Originally I purchased their "Workstation" and tried to get some information about how to use all four of my cores since the software allows a maximum of 2 per virtual machine. I also wanted to get some information about how the software allocates processor time, etc. I tried calling several times, emailing, filling out web forms, etc. and never got a single response even though I was supposed to get support with my software. I therefore suggest getting the free version since paying anything for support is a total waste of time.
One other thing to be aware of is apparently VMWare is no good with great graphics cards; so if you want to play Spurting Blood of GLory VIXI on your nVidia 10000 GTX5000XXZ card, you should have windows as your host OS and Linux as the guest.
Anyways, for the most part I have had a great experience with the software, but poor experience with VMWare. I am now working on installing the free version on three other computers which will have Windows as the host and Linux as the guest. Austin has successfully installed VMWare with a Windows host and Linux guest on his laptop (Intel Core Duo and 2GB RAM) and it runs pretty good. No noticable slow down. With VMWare, you can always change the amount of RAM available to a virtual machine to prevent it hogging up your whole system. If you install it and it doesn't work, you can always remove it. It's free. Plus the installation took me a total of one afternoon, including the Windows software installation. Networking was a bit tricky, I ended up having to assign an IP to both the Linux and Windows machines but this was due more to being at a University. Also if you want to install a 64-bit OS in VMWare you have to change some settings in your host OS's bios. But these are nothing very technical or demanding or tricky. It all seemed pretty self explanatory.
Good Luck with it! If you have questions, you can email me. Don't bother contacting VMWare.
GK: do you run Matlab in the Windows host or the Linux guest? How much memory do you leave the VM?
My guess is that (apart from memory concerns) the CPU slowdown will be a latency-not-throughput issue: that once Matlab gets down to inverting some giant matrix or Photoshop starts a-filtering it goes mostly as fast, but that for the little interactive crap there's a noticeable difference. With a fast enough base machine (and more importantly, no faster machine to compare it to) it won't be too bad -- but I bet Google Earth &c lose a step in the VM.
Installing linux as the VM with windows as the host does make a lot more sense. The memory footprint will be way more manageable, the people who wrote the guest OS will have replied to bugs on it, the driver situation won't be noticeably crappier than it is anyway.
For the USB thing, you could use Samba if that's a common task, but I bet unplug/replug is the sensible thing.
cool. thanks y'all for the advice. I think i'll try vmware server, but I'll wait until the new Ubuntu 8.10 LTS thingy comes out in April. I'll have to reinstall all the windows stuff. But that's ok -- the current windows install is now at that magical point where everything it does mysteriously sucks ass.
it could run stuff really slow. but then that might encourage me to move completely away from windows without actually buying a new mac.
i think i have a linux copy of matlab someplace. dunnoh though.
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¿Quién es más macho? El sistema operativo de Macintosh, versión diez! Por que la interfaz de línea de comandos, y la "Exposé" son muy macho!
A more serious response -- jesus jumping jiminy, javelina, if you're going to lazyweb this pathetically, at least give us minimal scraps of information.
What architecture do you have, and what architecture are you looking to virtualize? What are you going to run on the virtualized machine? How carefully have you looked for a non-emulated option? Is your machine fast enough to handle virtualized apps? Have you, y'know, considered installing the 30 day free demos these products offer? And what the fuck do you mean by "What if windows is already installed"? I actually hear the best things about VMWare, with Parallels second. If you're using the machine to game, forget virtualizing and just dual boot (in which case having separate hard drives is certainly the easiest approach). If you have old hardware sitting around (and I know you do), VNC/Windows Terminal Server is another option worth exploring.
posted by mrflip at 01:49AM CST on March 29