[CALUG] SPAM-LOW: Re: SPAM-LOW: Re: Linux Friendly Laptops

[Chris Edillon]

On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 12:42 -0500, Gardner Pomper wrote:

> 3) We (another guy at IBM and I) have been unable to get gigabit throughput
> through the gigabit LAN adapter on any PC, so my network access is back down
> at about 100MB.

  are you using the default vlance driver?  you should be able
to get more than 100MB speeds using vmxnet.

> 4) I expect (haven't tried games in the VMs) that the video performance
> would be degraded, but it is perfectly acceptable for regular X windows
> work.

  vmware workstation has included experimental support for
directx since 4.x, but it's known to be buggy and the vmware
folks have said they don't plan on more than experimental
support for the near term.  i did see a couple of vmware
engineers playing max payne in a winxp VM on top of a linux
host, which was pretty cool.  for configuration details, see
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_d3d.html

> New news: I bought VMware workstation (list $199) because it was the
> cheapest. Their next one up, GSX was like $1000. But they have release the
> beta of GSX for free recently and rumor at least has it that it will stay
> free. I don't know if GSX has as much hardware support as Workstation, but
> you can give it a try.
> 
  vmware server (was called GSX) is free during the current
beta period, and will remain free after it becomes generally
available.  they will sell support for it, though, as well as
continue supporting current GSX customers for a few years.
in general it should support the same hardware as workstation,
although it may be a bit behind the current workstation version
as VMware releases all of their new features in the workstation
product first and the server products have to play catch-up.
the spec sheet details the current list of virtualized hardware:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/server_specs.pdf

chris