RE: [Thinkpad] dual boot vs vmware

I just moved from a dual boot Toshiba Tecra to a new ThinkPad T40p. With
the Toshiba I was using a third-party boot manager called System Commander
to handle booting between Linux, XP, and 2000. SC worked very well. I
think it is the best boot manager I have come across. With the new T40p I
am now using VMWare Workstation instead. I have environments setup for Red
Hat Linux, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows XP.

My feeling is that the VMWare environment is much more convenient than the
dual boot was. One very nice feature of VMWare is that you can mount a
virtual CD drive from an ISO image. With two 60 GB drives in the T40p and
no CD/DVD drive installed there is plenty of room on the system for ISO
images of all my CDs. This means I can setup new environments if/when
necessary without much trouble.

The dual boot environment made it difficult to share files easily, and I
found myself always wanting something that was in the other environment.
That meant shutting down and rebooting. That was always a pain. VMWare
makes this a non-issue since I can just click in another window and get
access to my other environment.

I use my system for software development and usually end up with a bunch of
software applications installed over time. One thing I am trying to do now
that I have VMWare is to keep the base operating system relatively clean and
use VMWare environments for everything else. This means I have Office
(mostly for Outlook and Word) and a few other things installed in the base
system. Then I do everything else in VMWare sessions. I have one VMWare
session with XP in it and this is where I install Visual Studio .NET and SQL
Server for development.

One thing I've noticed by doing this is that the system is very responsive
when booting up and shutting down. I think this is because I have not
polluted it with lots of additional software installations. All of the
software I use for development is now in the virtual environments instead.

VMWare runs fast well for Linux and W2K, but I have had some trouble getting
it to work with the new Longhorn PDC bits.

If you decide to go the VMWare route, be sure to install their utilities in
the virtual environment after the basic operating system is installed. This
step is very important for getting access to higher screen resolutions,
sound cards, and USB ports.

Cheers

-- Bennett

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thinkpad-bounces@stderr.org [mailto:thinkpad-bounces@stderr.org] On
> Behalf Of jrdiii@comcast.net
> Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2004 3:31 PM
> To: thinkpad@stderr.org
> Subject: [Thinkpad] dual boot vs vmware
>
> Just got a new R50 (to replace my much beloved A20p), running XP and would
> like to run Linux as well. I'm intested in people's experience in setting
> up dual boot vs running under VMWare. I'm likely to be running XP most of
> the time, haven't previously installed/run Linux, and would like to
> minimize the sysdamin-type overhead (MS's security holes are enough of a
> job).
>
> TIA for real-world experience/opinions.
>
> Justin
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> Thinkpad@stderr.org
> http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad

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Received on Thu Jan 8 19:34:54 2004