This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: vmware and performance From: Tim Pickering <tim@astro.rug.nl> Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 21:23:41 +0200 > Not to start a flame war, but why does it have to be freeware? I find vmware > to be a excellent product, well worth the 75-99 dollars. Save me a lot time > rebooting to the other OS and I don't have to worry about crashes and stuff. > (Ironically, Windows 95 seems to be more stable in Vmware machine). vmware is the kind of commercial linux software we should encourage, if anything! it's very high quality, they focus on linux, and they give back to the community (their X DGA stuff will be included in future XFree86 releases). and it's very reasonably priced. maybe someday there will be a comparable open source virtual machine like that, but in the meantime it's well worth $75 for me to be able to boot other OS's while keeping my main OS intact and running. as far as win9x being more stable within vmware, it's not that surprising since vmware presents a very generic hardware face to windows. simple IDE drives, an old and well-tested lance ethernet, generic soundblaster sound, and plain old serial ports. you're using fewer drivers and the ones you do use are relatively well developed. thus fewer possible bugs are entered into the equation. it seems to me that linux+vmware could be killer in corporate desktop environments. it'd make windows support a helluva lot easier. everyone's setup is identical hardware-wise and it's easy to pop new setups in and out between computers (run the exact same win98 setup at work, on the road, or at home, for example). or remotely fire up someone's setup over the net via NFS to diagnose problems. hmmm..... ===