On 16 May 2006 17:56:14 -0500, Harry Putnam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So cutting to the chase here: Do you think this being an athlon64 will have a bad effect on gentoo install or will it install as on any other machine and maybe even allow me to use the 64bit version if I felt adventurous?
Nope - VMWare doesn't give the guest OS a hardware copy of what the host machine is - it does software emulation of the entire computer - BIOS, CPU, Video Card, Hard Drive (unless you go for RAW access to a specified hard drive), sound, etc etc. IIRC the CPU it emulates is a Pentium-III - don't remember how fast... Hang on, hang on - just was reading the VMWare website to get the speed - evidently in VMWare Workstation 5.5 (I assume you're talking about using Workstation and not one of the other product lines?), they do offer 64-bit CPU virtualization for the guest OS if your actual CPU is on their whitelist (available in PDF at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/processor_check.pdf ). So, I suppose, you might just be able to do a 64 bit install on the system. Let me know if it works. ;)
Do you think running gentoo as a main desktop as I have been when it owned the machine, doing all mail and most web related stuff like keeping a site up or just browsing, running most backup related stuff with rsync etc etc will work out in a vmware setting?
It should, I didn't run into any userland issues that could be attributed to VMWare once I had the system up and the kernel configured/built properly to support the "hardware".
Considering some rsyncing can be pretty labor intensive or compiling something like a kernel or emacs will this just bog down other work the athlon may be doing?
There will be a performance impact to the "actual" OS on the system - it has to share hardware resources with essentially a second OS - but not only that, it also has to do the work of virtualizing all the hardware that the second OS is using - so you will see a (probably quite) noticable performance impact on your host OS and the other apps that it is running - however, how noticableit is, and whether or not the noticability of it is determined to be too high for the other purposes that this machine will be serving, will have to be determined through experimentation. HTH - now I'm going to have to go and read up on the other new features in version 5.5, see if I stuck my foot in my mouth anywhere else. <grin> -James
The athlon is an athlon64 3400+ at 2.2ghz (socket 754). It is about the equivalent of a p4 at 3.2ghz in my experience. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
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