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VMware Euphoria

I've been playing around with VMware since about 2000, but I've never had a computer powerful enough to really run it. Yesterday, I bought another 1gig stick of RAM for my MacBook, which puts me at 2gigs. That's not a heck of a lot, but it's enough.

I now have OS X, Ubuntu, and NetBSD running full screen on different OS X Spaces. I setup VMware Fusion to allow Ubuntu to use both CPUs and 1gig of RAM, whereas I only allocated 1 CPU and 256mb of RAM for NetBSD. OS X does fine with whatever the other two don't use. Ubuntu now has enough horsepower that I can even play the video game I wrote at full speed.

With a simple hot key, I can be in OS X, Ubuntu, or NetBSD. Even better: I can shut the lid of my laptop, and all three suspend without crashing. They all share my Mac's wireless connection, which tends to be pretty stable. If something is giving me a hard time installing under MacPorts, I can just install it on Ubuntu.

Being a minimalist, I only have one computer, so it's kind of hard to play around with fringe OSs, which I used to love doing. That's about to change. Next up, MINIX 3 and pc-bsd!

Oh my gosh that's cool!!!
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Comments

Jonas Beckman said…
Hi! I am a Fusion fan too. Great stuff: using Spaces to switch between different operations systems running full screen, not having to worry about suspend, using the Mac's great connectivity... everytime I demo my workstation people are envious. Currently I am running Ubuntu 8.10, Debian 4.0, Windows XP and a VM machine dedicate to Smalltalk, Seaside and Gemstone hacking.

Like you I have used Vmware stuff for several years. When Fusion 2.0 added multiple snapshots I think it became not only a great consumer product but a serious developer tool.

BTW, are you using the networking between the virtual machines? Using one as a server and the others as clients or testing multiple server setups?
12:51 PM
jjinux said…
> BTW, are you using the networking between the virtual machines? Using one as a server and the others as clients or testing multiple server setups?

Not yet, but I hope to. That'd be a great way to play with some distributed computing under Erlang.
1:10 PM
jjinux said…
VMware crashed on me. FreeBSD was leaving X and going back to terminal mode at the same time I went from full-screen to a normal-sized window. It seemed to restart automatically, which was weird. I could be remembering that part incorrectly.
1:14 AM
jjinux said…
Ugh, Ubuntu upgraded its kernel, and now it won't restart :( It's completely stuck.
6:16 PM
jjinux said…
Hmm, it may have been my fault. I'm at Starbucks. I wonder if the wonky network connection at Starbucks could conceivably cause the problem. I deleted the virtual machine. Now I'll never know :(
6:27 PM
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