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VMware Signs Deal with Microsoft

Posted by emmett on from the ewige-blumenkraft dept.

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.

5 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. How about an OS Variety Pack by tilly · · Score: 5

    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
  2. Sounds good by imp · · Score: 5

    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.

  3. Making Windows stable by Cato · · Score: 5

    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...

  4. Why Angry? by tomreagan · · Score: 5

    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?

  5. Comments Summary by tomreagan · · Score: 5

    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!