> One potential problem for a production envireonment, it doesn't speak the > microsoft networking language, so you can't use it for SMB mounts. You > can however use linux to mount the windows (or hopefully samba) shares > into a directory that Windows can see. I'm slightly confused. You're saying that you can't mount windows shares in VM, but that if you mount them through Linux the VM can see them? EWWWWWWWWWWWWW! That really sucks. VMWare doesn't have such limitations. The Windows VMWare clients work fine for sharing files and mapping network driver. I've even had both NT and Windows 2000 domain controllers as well as Citrix terminal servers working under VMWare. VMWare is an excellent testbed. (Undoable disks are quite useful.) As far as partitioning goes, you get a few options with VMWare. A virtual disk is a file on the host file system that appears as a physical disk drive to a guest operating system. The file system can be on the host machine or on a remote computer. When you configure a virtual machine with a virtual disk, you can install a new operating system onto the disk file without the need to repartition a physical disk or reboot the host. Virtual disks are limited to a maximum of 2GB. The actual file used by the virtual disk starts out small and grows to the maximum size as needed. A plain disk is like a virtual disk, but it can be larger than 2GB. It is composed of several files, called extents. Each extent is limited to 2GB in length. Unlike a virtual disk, when a plain disk is created, all the disk space defined for the extents is allocated and filled with zeros. A raw disk directly accesses an existing local disk or partition. Raw disks can be used to allow VMware to run one or more guest operating systems from existing disk partitions. Raw disks may be set up on both IDE and SCSI devices. At this time, however, booting from an operating system already set up on an existing SCSI disk or partition is experimental. On top of that, you get a few different modes you can throw these disks into. Persistent: Same as using an actual disk. Changes are written as you go. Can be used with all above disk types (Vitural, plain, Raw) Nonpersistent: Changes to nonpersistent disks are not saved during the VMware session and are lost at the end of the session (that is, when the virtual machine is powered off or reset). Undoable: Similar to Nonpersistent, but when you poweroff you can choose to commit or discard the changes. VERY useful for testing software installs and the like. > Another neat feature I found useful is that I can give the VM access to > the parallel port and talk to things directly, whether configured in > Linux or not. In VMWare you can configure the VM to give access to hardware that you have configured. (Paralell and Serial ports.) You should be able to install your printer (even those darn winprinters) or palm pilot drivers under VMWare and get them working (haven't tried this myself, been using network printing for some time now, even at home.) Though if you can browse the web I can't imagine why you can't get SMB shares working. Even the Win4Lin site states that it Supports Windows TCP/IP networking, so everything should work. You may need to find the registry hack to make Windows use plaintext passwords to access samba shares (or change security to share in smb.conf, or make your samba server part of the NT/2000 domain and bypass the issue all together) In the end: If you need development/test enviorment or support for something besides Win9x you're stuck with VMWare Workstation. If you just need 9x and fully functional networking, you'll be ok with VMWare Express. If your resources are limited, sounds like Win4Lin is your best bet. (Though it might have a few network quirks.) Anyone played with plex86 to see how functional it is/isn't? -- Andy Zbikowski, Sys Admin | (WEB) http://www.ltiflex.com LTI Flexible Products, Inc. | (PH) 763-428-9119 (EX) 132 21801 Industrial Blvd | (FX) 763-428-9126 Rogers, MN 55374 | (PCS) 612-306-6055 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: andyzb.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 367 bytes Desc: Card for Andy Zbikowski Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20010216/33975698/andyzb.vcf