[JohnWill]

I changed horses and installed SUSE 10 under VMWARE to see if that worked better for Linux, and for the most part it does appear that it does. However, there is one oddity that still escapes me.

The emulated sound appears to work correctly, I get the startup and shutdown sounds and the like. However, when I play an MP3 file, the default MP3 player, which is amaroK, just zips through the file in a few seconds with no sound. I don't see anything in the configuration that would fix this. Is this a missing CODEC or the like?

[jiml8]

I personally have had a lot of trouble with amarok. Given the multiplicity of multimedia solutions for Linux, I haven't tried to sort it out.

I use mplayer with either the gmplayer or the kplayer frontends for pretty much everything and pretty much everything works.

Mplayer can be found here:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

Make sure you download and install ALL the codecs. You probably would be best off compiling your own version, but before you do that you need to be sure you have a number of optional libraries and packages installed on your system. This would take a fair amount of time to figure out; you can do it more quickly by getting a precompiled package for your OS.

The gmplayer frontend is an optional compile feature for mplayer; I doubt that a precompiled package will have it. Generally, it sucks, but sometimes it is very useful.

Get kplayer here:
http://kplayer.sourceforge.net/

You also should obtain plugger to facilitate using mplayer (and others) as plugins for mozilla, firefox, and konqueror. You can find that here;
http://fredrik.hubbe.net/plugger.html

Finally, streamtuner works very well as a means of organizing and connecting to streaming media sites and local multimedia files:
http://www.nongnu.org/streamtuner/

Streamtuner plus kplayer does pretty much everything that amarok does and, in my system anyway, is much easier to use.

[JohnWill]

Thanks for the references. I downloaded both of them, neither has a pre-compiled version for SUSE that I could find. Kplayer comes up with an error when I try to compile the source, even though I've been able to compile other stuff, including the kernel on this VM. I may have to take a run at compiling Mplayer...

[jiml8]

The error is probably one or more missing packages. I seem to recall having to symlink some includes when I first compiled kplayer...don't recall exactly what I did.

Then too, the amarok problem could very well be codecs. The mplayer site has a LOT of codecs and if you install them and tell amarok where they are perhaps that will do it.

Oh. "symlink". Take a look at the ln command ("man ln" will enlighten you). You can think of a symlink as a Windows shortcut on steroids. Learning how/when to use links (both hard links and symbolic links) will make your linux experience much more versatile and trouble free.

[JohnWill]

I actually do know what a symlink is, I still remember that from the years back when I was keeping one foot in the Unix world.

I did more work on both Virtual PC and VMWARE and have come to the following conclusions.

If you want to run Windows hosts, you're probably better off with Virtual PC for the most part, especially MS-DOS which has minimal support under VMWARE. If you want to run non-Windows hosts, VMWARE seems to be the clear choice. Something for everyone in this post.

[jiml8]

You are running VMWare in Windows; I cannot comment on that since I run it in Linux.

I do have to say that installing windows in VMWare in Linux is pretty much exactly like installing it on a real machine, and I have never encountered any compatibility issues (except zip drives). The Windows display is slow in VMWare. Certainly too slow to play games, but not an issue with ordinary productivity stuff. That is pretty much the only issue I have with it.

When I put VMWare into full screen mode, then the system looks exactly like a native Windows system.

[JohnWill]

Well, specifically, sound doesn't work properly in W98 emulated machines in VMWARE. There is a statement on the VMWARE KB that says "we know and we're thinking about it", but that's a significant issue for testing many packages. That's the biggest glitch I've seen with Windows, but it's significant. I haven't emulated XP or 2K yet in VMWARE or Virtual PC, that's coming at some point.

[saikee]

I am rather disappointed by VMware myself for the following reasons

(1) To install a Linux in VMware, managed by Windows, the distro only has a fraction of the resource. I have 1Gb ram and Vmware assigns 1/4 of the meory to each of the 4 systems it prepares to manage. Not really a faster runner to operate a Linux at 256Mb ram, is it?

(2) The Linux is managed inside VMware as a file. For that the Linux has no boot loader, no choice of partition and the swap and root partitions are no different to the BSD sub-parts buried inside one partition of the hard drive. That is not going to help users wanting to understand the inner working of Linux.

(3) Just about everything is slow in VMware. The host Windows is robbed part of the memory.

(4) I have a normal XP and all 64 bit Linux distros cannot be handled. Many Linux installers have not been written to be installed inside VMware and so a lot of them will not be installable.

Seem to me VMware is really for big guys running expensive servers with huge amount of rams and multi-core processors. Therefore losing part of the ram and CPU usage can hardy matter. For a humble home user I find linking several PCs together by a KVM switch is far more effective because each physical PC can run at its peak performance at least.

I am using one PC, with XP, to load a Suse 10 with VMware. Suse runs but VMware kicked out Kanotix. At the moment VMware is soaking up 75% of the CPU time to install Solaris 10. I feel like going back to 386 era.

[JohnWill]

I've gotten decent performance from Linux under VMWARE, probably not as fast as a dedicated machine. I have an AMD 64 X2 with 2gig of memory, so giving the Linux partition 512mb isn't really a problem. You can create up to four virtual disks, or mount physical partitions with VMWARE, so that's not an issue that I can see.

I'll agree that if you have less than a gigabyte of memory and a slower processor, you're not going to like the speed you get with VMWARE. I'm running right now with SUSE 10 in a virtual machine with 256mb of memory on this P4-3.2ghz machine with 1gig of memory, and it's downloading a bunch of updates. I see the virtual machine running around 10% of the processor capacity, and I don't see any effect on my operation in Windows.

If you're trying to run a bunch of virtual machines at the same time, the performance will obviously suck, but is that really necessary? I want to have a Linux VM so I can tinker with it and learn my way around Linux again. I also have a W98 and an MS-DOS VM under Virtual PC, to test compatibility with older operating environments. I normally only have a need to run one at a time, since there's only so much I can do with one set of hands.