[Ti] VirtualPC Question

[Chris Olson]

On Saturday, March 29, 2003, at 07:05 PM, b wrote:
>
> Thank you very much for your reply. I failed to mention I'm on VPC 
> 5.0.4
>
> I figured it out. There's no extensions on the Sparse drive Images. 
> Nor is there a file with a .vhdp extension. This might be due to my 
> setup. Be that as it may, after reading your letter, i went and looked 
> very carefully at the files. They seemed exactly the same. I used File 
> Buddy, with visibility on all to look at each one, and then it hit 
> me....<pause to feel dumb>... the files looked identical, because the 
> VirtualPC folder in the OSX partition...was an alias. And it was 
> pointed at the my OS 9 Documents folder.

LOL.  That'll do it every time!  Good thing you didn't trash that 
folder in your OS 9 Documents directory!  VPC wouldn't run very well 
with a broken symlink :-)

> That's good news, except for the fact that trashing the OSX VPC folder 
> will only give 8 kb of space rather than 4 GBs  <laughs>

Things are getting better as we go.  You just recovered almost 4GB of 
disk space without even trying :-)

> One- Did you use VPC 5 at some point and upgrade? and if so, did you 
> trash the VPC 5 app?

No.  My previous version was VPC 3.0 running in OS 9.  I had Windows 98 
installed in that and it performed very well.  However, in order to use 
it I had to reboot to OS 9.  I also run linux servers, so I like to 
keep current with various linux distros.  I had several powerpc linux 
installs in one of my laptops and got tired of rebooting different 
linux distros all the time too.  So I bought VPC6.  My old Win98 drive 
image from VPC 3.0 converted with no problem when I upgraded.

> Two- I'm curious what you think of Redhat Linux in VPC? I realize 
> there's some performance gain in VPC 6, which I don't use, yet, but 
> it's mostly screen redraw stuff from my limited experience testing VPC 
> 6. Does Linux run pretty well on your setup?

Redhat is a dog.  On native hardware it's a dog.  The BlueCurve 
interface leaves much to be desired, and it's the poorest RPM based 
desktop linux I've seen.  My favorite is Debian.  I finally came up 
with an /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file that got X running in Woody, then 
apt-get upgraded it to Sid so I could try out the latest cutting edge 
in Debian.  I also got a powerpc install of Debian on a different 
partition on this machine, but it's no different than the x86 install, 
and VPC allows me to run it without rebooting.  KDE3.1 is no speed 
demon on emulated hardware, but it's fully functional - I'd say about 
like Windows 2000.  Compared to running the powerpc install of 
Debian/KDE3 on native hardware, which we'll rate a 10, I would rate the 
x86 install in VPC as a 6 for performance.  It's about the same whether 
you choose Redhat or Debian or anything running KDE.  Gnome might 
perform marginally better, but it's not too noticeable.  Once you shut 
down X and run linux at the command line, you really can't tell the 
difference between native and emulated hardware for performance.  I 
must say, though, that heavy programs like Konqueror do perform quite 
well in the VPC install, and I'm overall happy with it.  It sure beats 
rebooting  to run them, and OS X is the One True Desktop anyway, so I 
have no desire to run linux desktops to actually *use* them to do any 
work.

Just my personal opinion; If you want a rpm based linux desktop distro 
to run in VPC, I'd pick either SuSE or Mandrake before I'd install 
Redhat.  Installing Debian in VPC is not for the uninitiated.  Awhile 
back I did have Xandros 1.0 installed (Debian based).  It went in with 
no problems, but Xandros is a pretty unexciting linux distro so I 
removed it.
--
Chris