[mdlug] Converting Windows box to Linux+VMWare?

[Ingles, Raymond]

I've got a problem with my Windows machine at work. Recently, it's started
locking up hard when running VMWare. (The reason we need VMWare is pure
Microsoft silliness - their own compilers are slightly incompatible between
versions, so we need different revs of the compilers and libraries to work on
different revs of our product.) By "locking up hard" I mean the screen freezes,
audio playback halts, and nothing can be done but cutting the power and rebooting.
The system is stable except when running VMWare.

 I haven't been able to identify anything in particular causing the problem. I've
upgraded to a bigger disk recently, but I've uninstalled and reinstalled VMWare
Workstation 5 and 6, and started from scratch with new VMWare machine images, and
I still get the same lockups.

 I've heard that one can run a Windows install on a physical partition from
within VMWare. I'm trying to decide if I should shrink a partition on this
machine, install Linux, and run a couple of instances of VMWare from within
Linux - one for my day-to-day office stuff (like Outlook), and one for compiling
and development. I'd like to keep the existing Windows stuff insofar as possible,
just running it from within VMWare on Linux. I strongly suspect that VMWare will
be more stable on Linux than XP. The machine is a 2GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM, so I
figure it won't have too much trouble handling the load.

 Does anyone have any experience with this? Any tips or gotchas or warnings or
suggestions?

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                           (313) 227-2317

 "Capitalism works primarily because most of the ways that a company
  can be scum end up being extremely bad for business when there's
                   working competition." -rra
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