VMWare - You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!
So here’s the deal: when I was handed this laptop for work, I was instructed to install Windows 98 SE on it. I need to be able to work on Visual Basic apps, which means Windows, and since the laptop was a bit limited in disk space and RAM, that meant 98. Now, I wasn’t about to install Win98 on this new toy. I wanted my beloved Debian to be the base system. But I still needed to be able to work on Visual Basic apps with it (and while Wine has improved quite a bit in the past few years, I don’t think it can run Visual Studio without a hitch yet. What could I do? Enter VMWare.
VMWare Workstation 4 is a software package that creates virtual machines that exist within your current (host) operating system, which cazn run almost any other OS, including all flavours of Windows, Linux, quite a few BSD’s, etc. By way of a technique known as ‘virtualization’ these ‘guest’ operating systems can work and access the same resources as the host OS, while remaining separate processes. Which means that if your windows virtual machine crashes, your Linux base remains just fine and stable.
I finally finished setting up the installation of VMWare on this laptop today, and set up Win98 as the guest OS. After a few configuration tweaks, it’s working absolutely flawlessly. I ran Windows Update within it and it downloaded all the neccesary updates and security patches without a hitch, updated IE to 6.0SP1, and installed Visual Studio 6… and it all just works. It’s kind of weird, seeing that window on my Debian desktop displaying the full Win98 OS, but there it is. I get to have my cake and eat it: Linux on my laptop, while remaining able to work with Windows-only technologies when neccesary. Really really nice stuff, itg works flawlessly, a tiny bit of lag, but I’m chalking that up to the limitations of the laptop itself, not so much the VMWare system. While it’s running, the other machines on the network actually detect the host Debian OS and the guest Win98 system as separate machines, listing them separately even though tghey;’re technically running on the same physical hardware. It’s spooky.
Point if this rant is: VMWare rocks. If you really need to run Windows, fine, but that’s no longer an excuse to not have switched to Linux. You can have your cake and eat it. 
