It's not very difficult to get vmware working, I just did an install a short while ago. Install the free vmware server then install a client and the management tool. They are all installed by script. This is a bit of a bear to get working on slackware though, for this distro you need to set up a fake system v init dir tree or the setup won't run (totally lame install script!), install pam because vmware wants it and slack doesn't have it, and I had to change one of the config files related to pam, but oh well it's slack, I still love my slack lol One thing I wanted to mention though, I used to run the old vmware workstation 5 on windows and install linux on vmware, it worked excellent, performance was good, even with only 512mb ram in the system. However, this time I used the new free vmware server and client setup installed on linux and put windows on the vmware, it was horribly slow, it was not usable for my needs. I really don't know if it's because windows is on vmware (instead of linux on vmware) or if the new free product just doesn't perform as well as workstation 5 did. I just upgraded to 1GB ram so I'll try vmware again and see if it performs better. The audio support is horrible on vmware server/client, in fact its not really supported, and there is only ONE audio driver, hopefully it works for you, on my system it works, sort of, sometimes I get pauses in audio. If I'm not mistaken I think the vmware server sends audio over a local network to client, and it's not doing that very well. If you're going to play with vmware and linux, set aside lots of time for it, and expect that you will do some head scratching. It's not difficult but some things are strange, like it has SCSI drivers that emulate IDE and there are many different ways to configure vmware. The excellent way is setting it up so that you can either boot directly into each operating system or run inside a vm. There is a way to install it this way, by giving the VM access to the entire disk. There are documents on the vmware site on how to do this. This way you have the convenience of booting the guest OS in a window, or if you need better performance or true hardware, boot directly into the guest OS without the VM. I've done it before and it worked very well. I may actually buy a newer version of vmware workstation because I like it much better. It is one peice of software than I believe is worth the money. -- Doug
