On 06/11/2009 02:58 PM, David Gerard wrote:
2009/6/11 Michael Stefaniuc<mstef...@redhat.com>:
Paul Vriens wrote:
I need to run several Windows versions (95 up to Vista for now) for our
winetest and I really like the snapshot possibilities of VMware.
Suggestions, recommendations?
I'm using KVM/Qemu with libvirt aka virt-manager. I have problems with WinNT
and NetBSD; those hang/crash during the install. Win2k3, FreeBSD and
OpenSolaris work just fine and I didn't try anything else yet. But I'm on F9
and once I have a little spare time I'll move to F11. I'll test it there
(never qemu) if that fixes WinNT.
Since you're asking on the Wine list ...
I'm using VMware only for running winetest on Windows, so there is some
relevance.
VirtualBox does okay for Windows and Linux, barely for FreeBSD with
lots of caveats and not really for anything else. Notably, OpenBSD
doesn't work and the VirtualBox developers admit it but consider the
bug beneath their attention. It's really not a very well-written
virtualisation app.
VMWare is reputedly better - it's the oldest common VM software and
its emulation is very seasoned, well-tested and robust.
I've been a happy user of VMware Workstation from the very start but it
always annoyed me that they don't support Fedora.
QEMU *without* KVM works well, if slowly - it's almost a complete "red
pill" for the guest OS. With KVM, OpenBSD is known not to work
entirely properly.
(OpenBSD is a bit of a torture test for virtual machines. It's very
wary and cautious about what it runs on, and will happily segfault at
a perceived hardware problem rather than risk letting a program access
memory it shouldn't. Theo de Raadt says about a third of all problem
traces come from VMs.)
For testing Wine in other OSes, bugs found in a VM should always,
always be confirmed on a physical machine, with the OS running on the
bare metal - there are too many "glitches in the Matrix" in almost any
VM software to be sure a bug is real.
That's basically true for most applications. Most vendors have these
caveats in there support contracts.
Maybe I just revert to F10 for now and wait till VMware can properly
install/run on F11 (It's mostly issues with compilation and dealing with
newer kernel versions, 2.6.29/30). F11 doesn't do OSS (by default)
anymore which means no out-of-the-box sound in VMware Workstation 6.5.2
The problem with both VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM seems to be supporting
older Windows versions as guests (< NT4).
--
Cheers,
Paul.
