[CS-FSLUG] Virtual Machines

[Ed Hurst]

Been playing with virtual machines the past few days. Anybody done much  
with them?

Someone gave me Win7 Pro machine; needed only a new hard drive. Got it  
back to life and I'm enjoying it as the primary means to my book writing.  
It had no office ware on it, so I've had to make the most of it while  
saving up. I like the grammar checkers. So I got my hands on a discarded  
MS Word 2000 and it runs quite well on Win7. Still, I like to balance that  
with WordPerfect and Grammatik.

All I could get was 6.1 for Windows, which works okay in MS's XP Mode.  
However, MS Virtual PC is utterly useless for anything else. It's cranky  
and only a narrow selection of older distros work at all. They all work  
poorly, at that, so far as I can see.

VMware Player allowed me to run Win98 (thinking mostly about older Win/DOS  
stuff), but their integration is missing some critical stuff on that. Got  
it working in spite of them. However, installing Ubuntu 8.04 was a piece  
of cake, scripted in advance. Running it is really impressive. It's fast  
and integrated fully with Win7. So I tried my copy of WP8 for Linux, but  
had forgotten how bad the fonts were. Almost unusable.

Still, I have a nice way to run Linux when I need it, so long as it's not  
something too power-hungry.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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Kiln of the Soul - http://soulkiln.org/
blog - http://jehurst.wordpress.com/