[UFO Chicago] Vmware Player

[Brian Sobolak]

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend messing around with VMWare
Player.  Anyone else given it a shot?

My review:  it was fun to play with, but not worthwhile for much else.

VMWare Player is a new free tool from VMWare that let's you run VMWare
instances for free.  It's basically Workstation Lite -- you can't create
new VMs, and you can't do much by way of changing the ones you have.  But
it's free instead of the $189 for a licensed copy, and it does work.

I downloaded the Ubuntu distro to play with it.  Since I spend most of my
time on FreeBSD, I didn't have a lot of experience with some of the newer
Debian-based distros and wanted to kick the tires a bit.  Which I did. 
And it was ok.  But the start-up time on my (admittedly slow) machine made
it almost better to make it dual-boot--it wouldn't be fast enough for
switching back and forth between servers.

But everything worked "out of the box" -- without any configuration or
even installation I had a working Ubuntu installation by double-clicking
on a file I had downloaded..  Network browsing worked fine, X looked
gorgeous, most apps worked fine.  I didn't figure out how to make it
appear on the same subnet as the rest of my network (it creates its own
subnet and "bridges" to the host computer, which I thought was annoying).

It was fun to play with, but not useful for actually doing work.  I'll
probably buy another computer for $200 before I'll get VMWare working. 
But i'd love to hear other opinions too.

brian

--
Brian Sobolak
http://www.planetshwoop.com/