From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2007-02-12T19:02:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Linux OS

On 11 Feb 2007, at 03:50, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Still, I gave up on it -- it was just a lot of waiting around  
> relative to Gentoo on a real machine. Here in Portland you can pick  
> up perfectly good refurbished P3s with a decent hard drive and  
> enough RAM to run a Debian or Gentoo or Fedora desktop for less  
> than some of the restaurants around here charge for a small steak  
> dinner. :) There's little need to devote *part* of a machine to a  
> "learning server" using VMware when you can get something real. As  
> far as I'm concerned, VMware Workstation or the free VMware Server  
> have only one practical use case -- as a way of running a *small*  
> Linux workstation inside a Windows workstation. (Or vice versa if  
> you work in a Linux shop but need occasional Windows).

With current-generation hardware VMWare Server is pretty useable. I  
have a Core 2 6300 mini-ATX desktop with 1GB of RAM and Windows XP  
that I use mainly for gaming (currently Neverwinter Nights 2 :) but I  
have no difficulty running four FreeBSD appliances in the background,  
providing my consultancy clients with their own development sandboxes  
and a NAS. I've been thinking of tweaking things further by  
increasing the RAM as the Windows desktop lags a bit when switching  
tasks, and possibly RAIDing the HDD.

Of course all the real work gets done on my Mac...

Ellie


Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason