VMWare Inc. Releases Free Virtual Machine Runtime
rfinnvik writes "VMWare Inc. has released a new free (as in beer) virtual machine runtime called VMware Player. According to VMWare, this free VM runtime makes it possible for anyone to run virtual machines created in their Workstation, GSX or ESX products. It also runs virtual machines created in Microsoft's virtualization products. The runtime is available for both Windows and Linux."
why- cause it really WONT cost me anything to try...
Just pray I'm a vocal member of a new majority...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Basically, have you seen how there's a QEMU image of ReactOS, and I'm sure other OSes have QEMU and Bochs images?
Well, this means that they can now use a VMWare image, and link to the VMWare Player.
AFAIK, the existing virtual machines really just consist of a simple plain text file that describes the machine, and a disk image that can be one created by VMWare or another text file that points to a "standard" image file type.
So, does this mean that if I create those files myself, I don't need the commercial products at all?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
However, given the compatibility problems with previous versions of VMWare I am not sure how much use it will be to people who download Open Source VMs off of the web to run (and I assume that's part of who this is aimed at). I've read a couple of places, for instance, that the current version of VMWare won't run the VMWare installation of Plan 9 that you can download from Bell Labs.
That said, you can run Qemu with kernel acceleration on Linux, FreeBSD (a platform VMWare doesn't even support) and 2000/XP and get pretty good performance - and it's probably a better option than a mere 'runtime' given that not only does it support an additional platform (FreeBSD), but you can create a VM on one platform and run it on all the others (even ones w/out accerlation, such as NetBSD -though you really would not want to).
Still, in the time between QEMU catches up to VMWare feature-wise it's nice to have a legal-but-hobbled copy.
At least until someone writes a program to build compatible VM's, if they haven't already. The low risk trialware aspect of this is pretty interesting, and you know that none of the free VM's will run Windows, if Microsoft has anything to say about it.
Sounds like they are feeling pressure from Xen and are trying to prevent the truely free OSS solution from gaining mindshare. They make a good product, but cost and closed source will limit them in the long run.
...will be to deliver flash ads to those users that refuse to install it on their host machines.
Has anyone had luck with running VMWare on Linux and using a virtual machine to play Windows games? I play two online games and they are the only reason that I use Windows as my primary operating system. Not familiar with the performance concerns, but it looks like I could prepare a Windows gaming VM and run it when I game, and then work on other tasks in my preferred Linux environment. Googling...
Unbuntu has two different versions. One is an install CD, the other is a run CD that lets you launch linux from disc without installing anything. Now, of course, the CD version is going to be more limited, but given that you can read/write fat32 and network NTFS(and read local NTFS) you can still do a decent bit with it. It's not bad at all if you just want to give linux a whirl and see what it is all about/teach yourself how to use some aspects of linux.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Need to run Linux at work but corporate policy won't let you? (or plan to install Linux anyway, but need that killer-app for Windows?)... Boss won't buy you a copy of VMWare?
Buy your own copy for personal use and simply install this "player" on your work PC. Need multiple users wanting to emulate an OS and don't have terribly high demands? One copy of vmware... multiple players.
I'm drooling.
I think they wrote "VMWare Inc." rather than "VMWare" to avoid confusion... because alot of people, when they hear "VMWare" will think of the application/product, and not the company. Yes, I know that it would be hard for a product to release another product, but still. The "Inc." qualifier was just thrown in to make it obvious that they were talking about the company.
I suppose this is only a problem if you're already bigoted against anything "Inc."
So far, no virtualization systems I've used has ever supported dynamic USB support.
I wonder what kernels their Linux player supports usb support. I assume it will be something like FC4 or RHEL ?.
Can someone who has downloaded tell me how the usb hotplugging works for you ?.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I run both, and have very little trouble with VMware and the OS that is being run under it.
If you want to compare speeds, QEMU still lags way behind VMware, and unless you have one hell of a machine, you cant use it in production as its way too slow.
QEMU also has major troubles with hosting windows installs, which is what most people in business use VMWare for. ( virtual servers )
Dont get me wrong QEMU is a great thing and its improving quickly, but i would still not trust it for production, yet.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you dont want to figure out what is missing with the VMware offering, Parallels is offering 60 day trial licenses for its Parallels Workstation 2.0 Beta3. Check out www.parallels.com
Disclaimer: i have no affiliation to Parallels, I have just been trying out the product.
technoid_
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
VMWare Inc is the company, VMWare is their flagship product.
The day a product releases another product I'll REALLY worry.
Go away cynics. This is awesome.
I run into so many clueless tech support people that I've just been dying to send a VM to. Now I can. This is sweet!
Also, I have the win32 version of VMWare 5, but not the Linux version... like I said, sweet!
... Seen a paperless office lately?
Not just the VMWare images, but (more interesting for our company) also Virtual PC/Server images.
At least, that's what they claim. Tested the player with VPC and VServer images, but they all stop with an error in the log about importing something into the registry which is not in registry format. But then again it's still in beta.
home
You can get a free 30 day license from VMware for their regular product.
Make as many VM's you want and when it expires you can still use the 'runtime' thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The video card it emulates is pretty low end. It's acceptable for the old SimCity games (I've tried them) but not for any modern shooter.
There is also the problem where you're still sharing your CPU with the virtual machine so you may experience pauses in the game. Not really noticable with strategy and turn based games, but it may be a problem with shooters.
The good news is that you can load up different Windows versions for different games (you do still have the licenses, right?). So you can run Win95 or Win98 or Win2K or WinXP if you want.
DOS works okay for most games, but the VMWare sound emulation doesn't match any of the old 1980's-era games that I tried.
Sounds like they are feeling pressure from Xen and are trying to prevent the truely free OSS solution from gaining mindshare. They make a good product, but cost and closed source will limit them in the long run.
Xen is not a competitor to VMWare, at least, not right now, it isn't. Xen requires the guest OS to be built with explicit support for Xen. VMWare doesn't require that. Xen can't run any build of Windows or NetWare, but VMWare can.
It's clear that this product is a shot across Microsoft's bow. Ever since MS bought Connectix, they've been gunning for VMWare. Those who've tried both VirtualPC and VMWare Workstation have almost universally preferred VMWare Workstation (I haven't tried VirtualPC, but VMWare Workstation rocks), but VirtualPC is still cheaper than VMWare ($129 vs. $199). VMWare has also recently announced that it's hoping to standardize the virtual machine software industry around common VM file formats (VMWare's, of course). If, by using a free VMWare Player, they can get everybody else to adopt their VM formats, they'll have won that war before MS can even get into the battle.
This doesn't really cannibalize sales of VMWare Workstation, even if others figure out how to create VMWare-compatible VMs from other applications, because those of us who use VMWare Workstation like all of its features (and there are lots). What it really does is seed the market for VMWare's real money makers--GSX Server and ESX Server. MS has nothing close to those products right now, and VMWare's hoping to permanently establish themselves as the market leaders before MS can get a comparable product on the market.
No, no, the day to worry is when a product releases an Inc., i.e. starts up its own company.
ha now that osx86 installation vmware image you downloaded can run on a leagal copy of vmware!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Take a flash drive running Linux + the Linux version of this, and boot a Windows VM. You could even do it in an encrypted partition so you really could have a high security self contained Win32 enviroment ;)
Microsoft Released Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Visio viewers. meanwhile lotus released a viewer for Freelance Graphics.
Now, on a more serious note, This is cool, the "Player" is far more complicated than any viewer/player out there, and the uses for the thing are intriguing. From the Web Page of VMware, collages can work on a support case and all share the same one in a VM, or you can demo apps in the confort of the VM. The page even points to VMs made available by IBM, oracle and others. Of course, question is, What is the Status of the SW that you run in the VMs, including the OS itself? In the case of FOSS, we know the answer, but in other cases, just watc out guys.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Not VMWare. Not vmWare. Not VmWaRe. Not v/\/\\/\/4r3.
Other than the lack of OS/2 support, however, VMWare does not seem to have any other important shortcomings, now that the free player allows to "clone and ship entire virtual machines" e.g. for the hassle-free demo and deployment of FOSS solutions.
Besides, it's a blessing for many computer classrooms, helping in particular to make them less Microsoft-centric and saving much time for administration at the same time...
Can someone upload a blank virtual machine, so we can get it and install our own OSes on it and run them under VMware?
Downloaded the player and their browser appliance image. Anyone know what the root password for the browser appliance is? [BTW, it's a very stripped down Ubuntu install, with Firefox, GAIM, BitTorrent, and a Terminal Server Client]
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I've heard many virtual machines don't work with BeOS due to how BeOS's scheduler works. Does anyone know if this will run it?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Can someone please upload a blank virtual machine for us to try out and install our own OSes on it?
Thanks
Does this mean what I think it means...I can run their Browser Appliance from a USB Key for free? That would be awesome....!!!
Player has a lot of positive buzz right now here, as soon as we all get back home they'll be thousands of player installs all over North America. This is the product I've been hoping for to help demo products for external customers, and allow internal clients to use VMs without having to pay extra money or allow them to change things.
Xen who? It's not even on the radar here. Nothing against Xen, but it is years behind WS5 or ESX3.
Microsoft has been here giving away Virtual Server 2005 with a free R2 update. I have 4 copies of it and I have no idea what to do with any of them. MS was presenting today how they plan to integrate Virtual Server directly into Longhorn. How long with VMWare count MS as a partner instead of as their primary threat?
ESX 3.0 looks sweet, lots of new features. AMD, IBM, HP, and Sun have also been showing off their newest and greatest hardware for running ESX farms.
I was at a Microsoft event last month where the presenter was really talking up Microsoft® Virtual PC 2004 as being the cats meow. He actually spent 10 minutes out of the 3hr+ technet program to hawk it.
So..... I went to look it up after seeing the story posted (No, I didn't RTFA) but they had links to download a free 45 day trial and the listed price was ($129.00 MSRP) for the software title. So then I went to VMWare Inc's site to compare products and darn it if MS is undercutting their price by $60.00 ($189.00 MSRP)for their VMware Workstation 5.
Call me cynical but it smells like a little competitive marketing!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
VmWare is feeling a lot of heat from a lot of areas. If you think that Xen is causing VmWare no heat, then you are sadly mistaken. Linux/bsd on xen runs with much less performace penalty than vmware. In addition, there will be shortly, a way to run MS in it, but with a performance penalty. That means, for the occiasional user of windows, this is perfect, and quite a bit cheaper. So yes, xen is very much a competitor to VmWare
Of course, if you are running lots of windows, then Conenctix will be shortly the prefered approach. I would be sutprised if MS does not include connectix for free with all their windows.
So if you run Linux and Xen is bundled automatically, you would pay for VmWare, why? Likewise, if you run Windows, and Connectix is bundled for free, you would use Vmware why?
Sad to say, I am guessing that VmWare is likely to be netscaped.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Unfortunately that personal copy will set you back about $300.
VMware used to be corporate murder. They released "betas" that were free. Now they are going 100% free. They can crush their competition. They are going to come out with some kind of platform for selling programs with built in "machines". I could run apache native on windows! Good idea guys! 64-bit rosetta stone?
Is a 40GB usb2 drive. I own one and haven't had a use for it in a long while.
Until now.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
http://ikaruga.co.uk/~nd/vm.zip
256MB RAM, 8GB IDE Hard-Disk, CD-ROM Set to Auto-Detect, Bridged Ethernet, Audio Enabled, Shared Folders Disabled, Snapshots Disabled, Guest Isolation Enabled
Note: I will be taking this down within a short amount of time simply to avoid sucking up too much of my bandwidth. Please mirror this file.
Note #2: I didn't actually test this in VMware Player. It should work and should boot off of your virtual hard-disk (which should fail, as it's blank) and then fall back to booting off of a CD in your CD-ROM drive (assuming the Player works as I think it would, which it probably doesn't).
ND
This statement is forty-five characters long.
People BUY VMWare? O_o
This is my first post after years of trolling. You all rock.
As the IT manager of a mid-size snowboarding company, I cannot seem to keep people from going to random, retarded websites where they pick up all sorts of whatnot. One of my problem imps actually now has a copy of VMWare on his desktop setup with a copy of Linux just so he can use his browser without messing up his computer.
Which brings me to this incredible little offer by VMWare and a question for all of you:
Could this, a virtual machine running purely a browser segmented and seperated from the rest of the OS, something that employees could run with (a little bit) less fear of infected their computer with the average random malware and spyware that exists on today's internet? Could this finally be the answer to Joe and Suzy Q Employee and my begging and pleading for them to click the little orange and blue icon, you no longer need to click the big E to get to the Internet?
Is this something we as small and medium sized IT folk should start to consider implementing on a wider scale?
Or am I just a wishful thinker?
Why would you need to run Linux at work if it's against corporate policy? More like "I want to play with Linux at work but it's against corporate policy to install it".
It looks like you can download an evaluation version of VMWare workstation that "dies" in one month. I'm not sure if you can create a VM with that, then play it with player, or if they're DRMed, but it's at VMWare's site.
You could also download a virtual machine here it looks like. I'm sure if you google you can find others.
I haven't tried this yet, but I bet it will revert to the original state every time you shut it down, otherwise they would essentially be giving the product away for free.
So if you started with a blank machine, you would loose all your work unless you kept it running 24/7.
But this is just speculation. I have no idea how they chose to limit this, but even so, I think it is great of VMWare to release this. I teach operating system courses and I'm going to definitely try it out (the only reason I haven't is that it supposedly does not install on a machine that already has VMWare Workstation on it, so I need to find another box for testing).
-- Marcio
$200. They dropped the price a few months ago.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
just load another secretary image
Can we see some samples?
Infuriate left and right
Any easy out here, for Linux based systems, at least, would be diskless boot with the root partition hosted off the vmware's host computer.
Okay, maybe not easy, but hey, this is slashdot.
Anyone know of a (trustable) source for a solid OpenBSD vmware image?
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Mind checking the price Again? it's $189 these days - for Windows or Linux.
nah, no sig... move on..
I know this going to sound like an advert, and maybe it is, but I'm not getting compensated for it.
VMWare lets you run multiple virtual machines on one computer. That's cool and all, but there is another product out there that does the inverse - it lets you join together multiple independent machines (like those in a beowulf cluster) and turn them into one big virtual machine with one system image. So, if you have 16 seperate PCs, you can boot and run linux and it will look like one big 16-cpu server.
This "reverse" virtual machine is from Virtual Iron and, sadly, it is not free. But it is damn cool, especially when you look at the extra stuff you can do like dynamically add and delete entire PCs. Theoretically you could acheive 100% uptime by switching out individual PCs when they start to fail.
The idea has a lot of promise, OpenMosix kinda-sorta does something like that, but not at all as slick. I'm hoping someone decides to take Xen in a similar direction so we can all build beowulf clusters in the basement and turn them into giant single systems.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Wow! I am simply in awe.
Somebody went through a lot of effort to type that in. I'll have to save it in case I need to impress some non-technical people.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
I'm planning on installing VMWare because I have a few applications that require a Redmond OS, and, if there is a way to avoid booting it, then I say, right on!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Some of us work in an environment where we manage Linux servers, but due to policy, must run Windows desktops.
I think this will be good for free (speech or beer) applications. Especially applications with smaller development communities often have times because people don't have the hardware to test on a lot of differet OSes. I've worked on a few OSS apps where I've been the only one to work on porting applications to anything other than one of the couple of Linux distros that the main developers use, just because out of all the developers I was the only one with a valid windows license and a copy of VMWare- due mainly to the fact that I get cheap software from school. It would be nice to simply have another developer download this player and then I can create an image of "X version Y" and send them the image and then have them do porting work.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
random term paper generator
Both Argon and Emboot have PXE boot VMware virtual machine images - anyone tried them? Or is that a non-starter for the VMWare player?
FYI:
One of VMware's killer features, making and reverting from snapshots, is not available in the player. But I'm still impressed with it none the less.
VMware, you rock! Thank you!
Now it makes sense for all linux distros to have VM images of their new releases available by torrent for demo, which would be much easier than making a live CD (as Ubuntu does).
I dunno, I do it the other way. I run Linux normally, and use VMWare to run Microsoft Windows in order to run Outlook, Word, etc. which unfortunately the corporate environment requires. The only thing I really can't do that I need Windows for is sync my PDA to Outlook, so I usually boot the laptop into Windows once a day. I would prefer to use the Linux tools for mail, but there are too many corporate apps that need real windows, and I don't have time to track down all of the solutions.
Any yes, I have separate Windows/Office licenses for both running native and under VMware. I did try to run with one disk partition sharing the two, but the problem is the code in Windows XP that checks if the system has changed hardware, and does a call home to Redmond to see if its legit.
I downloaded this and the image for the Browser-Appliance and read a EULA that refers to this as beta software. Specifially the subtitle on the EULA has "VMware Player EULA_rev20050927" It goes on to say the software is limited use and that users have the obligation to provide feedback with all the rights to reuse and republish said feedback. I was excited to read the initial story on this but if it's beta and with these limitations I'm afraid my feedback will be referring to competing and freely available alternatives such as the ones mentioned in this thread.
The smart thing to do now would be to make Xen and Qemu compatible with the VMware Reader images then start putting up VMware images of all the different Linux distributions on the torrent and ftp sites. The cancer will start spreading to even more machines. No need to dual-boot or reboot to a LiveCD. Just double-click and leave Linux running all of the time!
It's always tough for the present to compete with the glorious future.
VMware contributed a driver for our virtual video card to X, and it's part of the XFree86/Xorg tree, so you should be able to use that and get decent video performance on BSD. I haven't tried it myself though -- I'm not a BSD guy.
I'm not entirely sure how practical this is to do, but it would be kind of nice if there was a way to "profile" or "smart link" an application-specific VM image such that the profiled version didn't have all the OS junk that wasn't necessary to run whatever the intended application was. Sort of like a statically linked binary, I guess.
The upside to the player is that you don't need a fullblown VMware install to use it, the downside is that in many cases you need a whole OS image to run a single app. I know this doesn't apply for some OSS applications, but even with them it can be decidedly non-trivial to whittle down to some minimal OS install.
Virtual PC files don't even work on Windows. Well, Virtual PC 2004 files on Windows XP home to be specific. It gets half way through importing the virtual machine, then says it could not be opened. I tried with a dynamic hard drive, no hard drive, and a fixed size hard drive. Same thing every time. I'm not sure why it says it can open vmc files, because apparently it can not.
So just install QEMU >= 0.7.1, and use qemu-img to make the image. "man qemu-img" for details.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Works great on FC4 host. So far I've tested a Win2K image, Fedora Core 4 guest, Solaris 9. Images were created on VMWare Workstation for Windows from the the full version from my work. It also seems a heckuva lot faster than the other version I'm running.
I've used VMWare(Workstation and GSX) a lot for the last couple of years. I use VMware Workstation daily on my desktop at home. I have maybe 30 or so VM's(versions of Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, Netware, and OS X). I run Netware and Windows Sever in GSX on RHEL4. I couldn't live without VMware. Novell has recently started distributing some of their eval stuff via VMware images, I think Oracle has as well. I'm assuming that VMware is doing this to encourage other companies to start doing similar things. It's really a pretty neat idea, testing/learning about different OS's and software through VMware. I have also used Virtual PC, and I must say that VMware is much, much better that Virtual PC. The only think I use VPC for is to occasionally screw around in OS/2, and I'm probably going to try and install that in VMware sooner or later. I'll admit I haven't used Xen, but for me the best thing about VMware is that I can run different OS's. I don't think running Linux-on-Linux is nearly as amazing or revolutionary as running Netware-on-Linux, or Solaris-on-Windows, etc. I think that VMware Workstation 5.5(currently in beta I think, I've not tried it though), will supposely run x86_64 guests, on x86_64 hosts. VMware seems to be really moving forward a lot, each new release seems to add something that I will actually use unlike a lot of other software. I only wish they would offer updates to GSX a litte often. Right now GSX won't work with VMware Workstation 5 VM's(which support multiple snapshots). VMware Workstation 5 will run 4.5 style VM's, but you cannot use snapshots. Other than that, I can't say there's anything I don't like about VMware. And no, I don't work for them, nor am I in any way associated with them. Just a very, very, happy customer.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
I'm pleased to report that it works quite well! I converted a QEMU qcow image to vmdk with "qemu-img convert debian-unstable.img -O vmdk debian-unstable.vmdk", then I took the VMX file from the Browser-Application.zip (you could also use one from Google), edited the VMX to point to the vmdk as an IDE device, opened the VMX with vmplayer, and it's booting just fine. Thanks, VMware! :)
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
http://tinyurl.com/cgle2
:)
Heh, you're right, it's quite tiny: 320 KB raw, 1 KB zipped.
Actually, you can install QEMU on Windows and make your own blank images. But this is so tiny, might as well upload it.
I'm *assuming* that VMware can grow the image as needed; if not, 320 KB would probably be a bit cramped for an entire disk.
Good luck.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Do it yourself :)
l
necessary tools
1) Vmware viewer
2)Daemontools or similar software for loading virtual CDs
3)ISO of freedos (installable version)
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/
4)ISO of freedoslite
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/fdoslite.htm
3)the Browser appliance disk image available from VMware
preliminary steps
The configureation file for the browser appliance disk image sets the amount of ram needed at 256 MB.Not only is this overkill, it prevents the image from running on systems that really are adequete for the task.
To do this open up the browser appliance configureation file with notepad, and change memsize = "256" to a smaller value.I set it as 64MB
Now we need to get rid of the stripped down ubuntu install in the disc image.To do this we're using a CD version of freedos, either as an image or a drive. However, this is a little trickier than it would seem. WMware viewer will consider the LAST drive as the CD drive it can read.Thus it would be a good idea to use a virtual drive with its letter set to Z as the source drive for freedos.
Now, once you have that freedos disc loaded, load up the VMware image you are using.At the initial VMware screen press escape to go to the boot menu, and select "CD-ROM DRIVE"
This should bring you to the freedos installer
select the first option
"prepare the hard disk for installation of freedos...by running fdisk...."
this should bring you to FDISK, and a screen asking you if you want to enable large disk support. press Y and enter.
This brings you to the main Fdisk screen. From here select the third option to delete a partition, and the forth option on the next screen to delete non dos partition. There is only one non dos partition so press 1 and enter.Press escape and go back to the main screen
select the first option, to create a new parition, and the first option again, to make a new FAT partition, agree to make it the maximum possible size (Y then enter), and when you're back to the main screen, exit Fdisk.
This should restart the system. Press escape and choose to boot from CD again.At this point, GRUB (the linux bootloader) is messed so you have little option anyway.
at the Freedos installer, select the first option again, and this time format the disk.
choose to install freedos with freedos setup
choose to configure freedos setup at the next screen(first option)
and choose to start install on the screen after that(first option)
this brings you to a LONG file which you can skip by pressing esc after which you come to the graphical installer. Install.
Now mount freedoslite into your virtual CD drive. choose freeFDISK and create MBR
reboot.
You should now have a Disk image of Freedos,on a FAT 32 filesystem over which you can install your OS of choice.
Faileas Grey
http://tinyurl.com/cgle2
:)
Made it with QEMU, actually; so you can do it yourself too.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I downloaded a copy for Windows, installed in XP Home, hang my computer during installation, then refuse to reinstall over existing copy, telling me to remove it via Add/Remove program -- which doesn't exists because the previous installation failed and I had to press the reboot button.
So I manually edit the registry, hunt down all the left over files in my hard drive, and gave it another try. Without fail, it hang my pc again.
What a product.
VMWare ACE also lets you run VM's that are inviolable to the host machine. What makes Player different, apart from the cost? Can a Player VM save it's state between sessions?
I'd love to read the article, but for some peculiar reason, the VMWare site seems to be a bit unresponsive this morning...
the only reason I haven't is that it supposedly does not install on a machine that already has VMWare Workstation on it, so I need to find another box for testing
:)
Well, erm...
Isn't the whole deal of VMware about not needing another box for testing? Run the player in a virtual machine
Just tested it with a dos bootdisk, works fine.
Looks like VMWare's been slashdotted ;)
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
what is the root password for the ubuntu install with the browser utility and can the distro be made to be full blown?
how to read the sudoers file or get around to read it?
perfect!
In case of slashdotting:
a re-player-1.0.0-16981.exe
a re-player-1.0.0-16981.rpm
a re-player-1.0.0-16981.tar.gz
--- Windows ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMw
md5sum: 69474caa0802be99379973605a93b952
--- Linux ---
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMw
md5sum: 2027d6fa8956b73b9387e9313417ab49
http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMw
md5sum: cf0f07a05081272c073e2ffd4972b05f
I'm not sure how long they've been doing this, but microsoft now leverages the fact they own virtual pc to use it for training and marketing materials. They may not let end-users do it, but they bundle virtual pc (some read only persuasion) + images to show off different capabilities of their products. My company is an MSDN developer and we got a book of these type of CDs with VPC+Images on them.
My guess is this VMWare move is to allow them and other companies to do similar things. Wouldn't it be nice if training materials for MSCE (ugh) or better yet, Linux certifications had VMWare examples of systems running examples? Hell, you could even have users run multiple images to simulate a whole server environment.
If corporate policy won't let you install Linux, why would it let you install Linux under a virtual machine? In the end, you're still running a Linux system on the corporate network. This system may have it's own IP address or be NAT'd behind your host OS, but it's still there.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
i still prefer qemu to all of this ... with the kernel module it's fast enough to use for normal purposes.
... and thats it ....
... )
... let's see if they one day give us smth as simple and as afree as qemu is :D
qemu is free and you dont need heuristic images, you just create a hdd dump (or just run a livecd for a known linux distro
the vmware player's installer is a bit bloated. and it should have an option to work without the kernel module (ofcourse being slow but still
anyway, i guess vmware felt that someone is breathing into their neck, so they had to lower the average price for their products... smart move
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
This is why i am still a customer. They have never done wrong by me! Good going can't wait to use the new toys.
Xen is already better (faster) than VMWare, provided we're talking Linux hosting Linux.
Xen can do things that VMWare can't, because it relies on modifications in the source of both host and guest OS. This is its greatest advantage. Remember that Xen has been shown to run a modified version of Windows XP (of course I somehow doubt MS will ever make this "Xen Guest Edition" available).
So, in the Free world, Xen wins.
Didn't someone stick Jaguwire in one of these a few months back?
Well, maybe not your average Windows shop, but the ones that run Unix or Linux (like us) are paying close attention to Xen.
With Intel and AMD including new "virtualization hooks" into their procs, soon VMWare will lose much (if not all) of its technological advantages over Xen and other virtualizators on i386 platforms. Google up on "Vanderpool" and "Pacifica" (+Intel+AMD).
http://news.com.com/IBM+tries+server+approach+to+P C+business/2100-1010_3-5900930.html?tag=nefd.top
It seems VMWare is getting a move on.
That's when you budget for an extra "management server" which will be installed in a highly servicable location, like right beside that Windows desktop.
> Run the player in a virtual machine :)
:(
I hadn't thought of this, but sadly when I try I get "Sorry, this product cannot be installed in a virtual machine"
-- Marcio
They are used to running Windows where it belongs according to its own name: in windows (i.e. as a guest OS).
There are not many hosts to match the OS/2 experience in stability (though Linux would quite possibly qualify for most these days), and Windows XP, in spite of improvements (and an impressive unofficial list of supported guests), is not necessarily one of them.
I have used both "in anger" (for Windows software development, it's handy to install the software on a virtual machine running whatever OS you want to test, then revert to the pre-installed state) and I much, much prefer VMWare. I'm very glad we persuaded our various partners to switch to it.
Xenu loves you!
Need to run Linux at work but corporate policy won't let you? (or plan to install Linux anyway, but need that killer-app for Windows?)...
In the past I've used coLinux for when I have to use Windows.
Personally, I'm more interested in running Windows under Linux.