-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Here is the first part of my reply, since I needed to split this up to stay within the 5k list limit. On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 08:02:20PM +0330, Parham wrote: > VMWare is free? If yes, would you give me the address to download it? And is > it possible to run it under Windows XP? Yes, vmware-server is free, as in no cost, and you can find it at http://www.vmware.com. However, in order to get a license key for it, you need to give away most of your personal info, and agree to let them spam you, so, I'm not downloading it as long as that is how you get a license key for it. Yes, vmware-server does run under windows xp. There are 3 free alternatives however that I'm aware of, and they don't require that you give away your I.D., and your right not to receive spam, in order to use them. The first is microsoft virtualpc: http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc/ , and it runs on winxp professional, as well as the business flavors of vista, according to microsoft. Since they don't mention winxp home, that either means they don't support running it on that, or they did something to make sure you can't run it on that. It doesn't support linux specifically as a guest os, which means that the virtualpc guest additions aren't available for linux, which means I probably wouldn't be running a gnu/linux guest in virtualpc for the long term. Also, it's quite a chore to get the hostkey to wrestle keyboard control away from the guest back to the host. The one thing in it's favor is that it does support accessing physical serial ports on the host from the guest, even through a usb to serial converter, since the guest sees that as a standard com port. In fact, I am in the process of setting up a debian virtual machine, to use on the go (assuming the host system will have the vm software installed), and for when I eventually get a modern laptop, so I can just run gnu/linux then as a vm on the laptop, without needing to worry whether or not it has a serial port, whether or not all of its hardware is supported by gnu/linux, and whether or not I'd be losing my warranty should I choose to repartition the drive. The reason I'm mentioning this, is because I installed debian from the netinst cd inside of virtualpc with a serial synth, booted the grml livecd once I was done, and had software speech running in the new vm, I imaged the system partition using partition image, created a new vm in the next alternative I'm about to describe below, and restored my imaged system to that vm in the below described virtual machine software, and have now a debian vm with software speech running in my favorite free vm software, described next. The second alternative is actually one that Alex recommended on here recently. It is virtualbox: http://www.virtualbox.org Virtualbox comes in 2 flavors. The first flavor is an open source version, released under the gpl. They only provide the source for that version, and instructions on how to build it. It's aimed primarily at developers, so they don't provide ready-built binaries of the open source version. The second flavor is the virtualbox commercial version, which is released under a proprietary license as binaries only, but the license is very liberal and straight-forward in my opinion. The differences between the 2 versions are that the commercial version supports using usb devices attached to the host inside the guest, and the commercial version also supports running the virtual machine as a headless machine using rdp, the remote desktop protocol, which is the same one that microsoft terminal services uses in xp professional, in 2003, and I believe in vista. Virtualbox does run on all versions of windows since and including 2000, and it runs on gnu/linux, mac osx, and soon on os2 as well. There are 2 down sides as of now to virtual box. The first is that the gui interface is written in qt3, which means that it's tedious to work with. I was able to get around that slightly by reclassing the custom control in window-eyes as a multi-document window, but since the class and window style are the same for all components, I wasn't able to reclass everything to what it actually is. Continued in part 2 of this post. Greg - -- web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) - -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGkWHh7s9z/XlyUyARAh9OAKCO/3t+npfVDAO+rveP65idg53Y6gCgufuY JVHHYuZWZaIXq1RBuOd6FZk= =+aBs -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
