I moved onto Linux some time back and only ever missed two programs. Snagit and the Unicode editor Unipad. With virtualisation coming into the news more and more I kept thinking that would be a really neat solution. Have windows as a guest on my Linux box.

At a local LUG meeting a salesman from vmware convinced me that vmware would work on Fedora. Like a sucker I believed him and spent one hundred pounds on the product. It never ran. My complaints to vmware were ignored.

Last week I upgraded my memory to enable me to host windows 7 without swapping issues. Bought a copy of Windows 7 just under my 'radar' price of one hundred pounds and set to to find a hypervisor to use. Xen seemed the obvious one, but I eventually came round to believing that it runs paravirtualization, i.e. the guest needs kernel level tweaking to run. I wanted full virtualization, so that I didn't need to tweak the guest. Vmware next. I read (but didn't really understand) the intel ideas on kernel (level 0), somewhat higher level one programs all meant to enable the Intel VT virtualization. I only ever programmed the Motorola and TI cpu's at assembler level, the weaker (IMHO) Intel architecture not seeming appropriate, so I never did study the intel ideas on how things should be. Sods law says that M$ picks that one and so the neat linear memory maps of Motorola fell by the wayside and the overlapped Intel maps grew apace. Anyway, seems that vmware has a free for personal use hypervisor named vmplayer, which lets me run one guest, all I needed. Installed it, it runs, then disappears with no log entry. Great. GIYF? The vmware users have a very useful list. Fedora forum was the one that did it. I found the same problem reported, put down to an odd version of curl without the c-cares addition. Updating curl seemed risky since it's used in lots of other places too, so I kept looking and found another fix, to disable libcurl.so.4 in vmware, presumably it then uses the one in my OS? Either way the program runs, the use of curl (to fetch the vmware tools for the guests you have) is fine and I have a hypervisor. Win7 arrived yesterday morning, I launched vmplayer and started the install. In less than 30 minutes I had a working version of Windows 7, complete with updates. I never even looked at Vista, with its bad reports. Win7 however was getting good write-ups, so I deemed it worth looking at. It is odd... different from XP, in many ways. Mainly superficial, since once you find the right access, the underlying interfaces are as they were. I'll explore more and maybe report back here. As before, first port of call is Sysinternals then zonealarm. The other sweet spot is that every time I'm told to reboot, I can do so, and only see one window go black, to restart and colour up! Neat.

Anyway, to summarize the vmware setup for Fedora 12:

	      As root
	      Download, install vmplayer
	      #disable libcurl.so.4 in VMWare, e.g.

	      mv /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libcurl.so.4 \
	          /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libcurl.so.4.DISABLE

              This leave the certs untouched, you can install the vmware tools.
	      install your guests as you wish. 

	    

Only concern now, what do I install on Windows, duplicating what I have on Linux? Nothing? Everything? Some tools I guess. Wait and see.