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VMware Signs Deal with Microsoft
ken_i_m writes "VMware has signed an OEM deal with Microsoft to offer various flavors of Windows pre-installed with their product. Here is VMware's news release." Don't get too angry about this; if you're using VMware, you're probably loading up a version of Windows anyway.
I can see that this is good for Vmware as it solves some potential worries about M$ attacking them through licensing schemes that only allow windoze to be run on actual hardware. I guess this is good for VMware users because it might mean that windoze runs better on VMware and better supports the virtual machine. But what I don't get is why this is good for M$, what do they gain? What they lose is that they are helping people make the break to a more stable platform and relegating windoze to be simply an application launcher and runtime environment.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
> I wonder what the perfomance of a MAME running on Windows 98 VM running inside of Vmware running on Windows NT running inside of Vmware running on Redhat running inside of Connectixes Virtual PC running on a Mac G4/450 would be?
:)
Nonexistent. I can almost guarantee it wouldn't work. VMware didn't run itself recursively last I checked, for one.
You want real-world perverse twists tho, I plan to run Linux under FreeBSD by running it in VMware under Linux emulation
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Maybe this is just Microsoft's way of fixing bugs in the Windoze operating systems? I can see it now - Microsoft Win2001 installs Linux, VMWare, and their OS. OS runs on VMWare, with the setting tricked out so it cannot corrupt itself into uselessness, and viola! It will be at least as stable as Windows 3.1 (I remember those days - it crashed often, but I never had to reinstall the OS).
Wouldn't that be a hoot? The system could also be "journaled" through VMWare so that the OS from before the last five software installs was accessable. Then you could "undo" a software install that fsck'd up the DLLs for other programs.
Hey, this could work....(Just my luck, trying to be funny and now I'm sitting here thinking seriously about it!).
P.S. I know VMWare does not do all that now. (Just to head off the knuckleheads that flame^H^H^H^H^Hreply without "getting" the humor).
This caught my eye early this morning, and my first reaction was, "Are they going to raise the price of VMWare?" There's already a "Windows tax" on new PC's, is there going to be one on VMWare?
I have to wonder if this is the first step of Micro$oft's plan to move into Linux territory. Why port Office to Linux, if they can keep all the Windows-to-Linux converts using Office? Office is where their money comes from anyway.
I treat this in the same way that I treated the annoucement of Micro$oft's investment in Apple -- partly for the PR, partly to make it seem like they are playing nice in the business field, and partly to see if this can be a profitable outlet for Office and their other tools.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
And that's a good sign.
The cake is a pie
Visit here for a starting point. Remember, any application that will run on Win 3.11 sans 32S will run on Warp 3. You'll probably be limited to an older version of Nutscrape, but one is available. Some applications of note: Gimp, Opera, mpg123, MAME, Doom..
.sig: Now legally binding!
This is a good idea, but I'm just curious if this means they'll bundle more pre-installed OS images in the future. You know, like a pre-configured Solaris VM, or even another Linux distro that's already set up for a particular purpose. That would be pretty cool.
Then I got to thinking... I wonder if there's any clause in the deal that prohibits VMWare from bundling a "ready-to-run" image of another OS down the road?
And if so, would it even apply to a bundled Linux config?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I know this is a offtopic, but there isn't really a place to tell it, so I'm putting it here,
IT'S HEMOS'S BIRTHDAY TODAY!!!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEMOS!!!!
Besides, why would a natural reaction to good news for a successful product that many power users use make people "angry". Do the story posters have to be so anti-MS?
/. reaction to the merest insinuation that someone may be running Windows without a large-caliber weapon held to their head by a jack-booted MStormtrooper.
I'm guessing the poster is referring to the inevitable knee-jerk fizzing-at-the-mouth
I am sure there would be a market for compressed images of multiple operating systems. Imagine for $10 getting a variety pack that included compressed VMWare images of the *BSDs, Solaris 8, several distributions of Linux, EROS, and BeOS?
Very handy for someone who wants to play around, or for a starting place for testing...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The press release said that this is optional. I know that this will be good for those people that wish to keep all their licensing P's and Q's in a row. Some of my systems came with Win98 preinstalled, so running them with vmware isn't a problem. Other of my systems didn't, and I had to go out and buy an extra copy of win98. If I had the option to purchase direct from vmware, it would save me a trip.
The only down side I can see to this is if, in the future, the purchase doesn't become optional.
Actually you are quite close to the truth - Windows NT on top of VMware on Linux never, ever BSODs, whereas a similar NT-only system at work crashes every few weeks (happened today), while my NT laptop used to crash all the time when I used it a lot.
VMware's website has a case study of a law firm who installed Linux and VMware in order to run Windows with fewer crashes - so this is not just my experience...
One useful feature in VMware 2.0 is the 'suspend to disk' feature (like some laptops but no OS APM or ACPI support required). Currently you can only suspend to disk as part of suspending the VM.
However, it would be possible to save the Windows or other OS state to disk in an identical way every 5 minutes or so (the save to disk is quite fast if you have enough memory as it goes to Linux buffer cache). This would mean you could recover from any Windows/other crash, no matter how bad, back to your state as of N minutes ago.
This is similar to some Windows products that recover your state, but is much more likely to be bullet proof since it's done through the VM mechanism.
It would also be useful when testing out bleeding edge Linux kernels, of course...
Why should we be angry about this? Microsoft is conceding that people run other operating systems, and that their product fits well in a window. By endorsing a product that puts theirs in a window, they admit that you might make other choices for your underlying system. Essentially, this is an admission of an inferior product - people can now get the Windows functionality without the penalties of actually running windows.
And once we get people to run Windows in a Window, it becomes easier to open people up to completely different alternatives w/o legacy support.
Besides, why would a natural reaction to good news for a successful product that many power users use make people "angry". Do the story posters have to be so anti-MS?
This is a summary of all the comments at level 1 and below, so that everyone browsing at +2 can get an abstract.
1.) M$ is evil.
2.) MicroShaft will never win.
3.) This program sucks. Release it under the GPL.
4.) Hot grits!
5.) The GPL sucks. Use a BSD-style license instead.
6.) This is not news. We had this running years ago on my old system using a packaged version of and a box of .
7.) Natalie Portman! Hot Grits!
8.) Slashdot sucks now. I remember when the stories where written in C and posted in binary, so you had to disassemble before you could read.
9.) 3y3 0wN j00r b0x!
10.) This is old news. Macs have had this for years.
11.) Damn linux heads! You just hate MS b/c you are jealous. MS Roolz! By the way, can someone teach me how to make a "boot disk"?
12.) This is old news. This was invented at Xerox-PARC.
13.) Too bad Amazon already has a patent!
14.) I hate Jon Katz.
15.) This is old news. This was invented by von Neumann and Turing in 1943. Read Cryptonomicon.
16.) Hot grits! In my pants!