Hi all:
I have been working on a suggestion from Ron Crouch at Varian to try VMware's Workstation 5 product. This software--which is available as a free trial--allows one to setup a "Guest" operating system within a "Host" OS. The host can be Windows or MacOS (or Linux), with the guest OS being Red Had Linux (or Windows), for example. Ron has this working nicely on his Mac, running VNMRJ inside a Red Hat Linux VMware virtual machine. No dual booting. Has internet connect and printing through the VMware connection to MacOS drivers. etc. Very nice.
So, a question and comment. If any of you have tried the Solaris 9 or 10 (experimental) virtual machines, please let me know. The questions is, have you been able to get it to work reasonably?
I spent some time yesterday getting a Solaris 10 x86 installation going as a guest virtual machine within my laptop's Windows XP host. Solaris 10 x86 is available for free, and I know Solaris and have VNMR6.1c and VNMRJ for that OS, so this seemed like a great idea. Got Solaris 10 x86 installed and working, and then found out what the (experimental) meant that VMware puts next to these Guest OS options. Cannot get it to run at higher resolution than 640x480! Not very usable.... I can see that simple stuff in Solaris works ok, but....
So, comment is, don't try Solaris 9 or 10 x86 inside VMware unless you see specific notes that allow for obtaining a usable display resolution. Perhaps someone else out there has figured out a way around this (repeating my question)?
I got Fedora Core 3 (Red Hat's open/free software) installed in a virtual machine, and it seems to be happy (but takes >4 mins to boot on my laptop :(; it's an AMD XP 3000+ w 512Mb, so a reasonable PC). Haven't tried VNMRJ in it yet; waiting for Varian to get me a Linux CD.
Cheers,
Charlie
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Charles G. Fry, Ph.D. Tel: (608)262-3182
Director, MR Facility Fax: (608)262-0381
Chem. Dept., 1101 University Ave, Univ. Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706 USA email: fry_at_chem.wisc.edu
Received on Mon Apr 25 2005 - 11:11:00 MST