Virtual O/S on Ubuntu

My son, Andrew Krespanis recently had his Windows XP system so bogged down with spyware etc that he decided it was time to turn over his desktop computer to Linux (ubuntu), he had been running ubuntu for quite a while on his laptop.

He totally wiped his hard drive and installed ubuntu, however he still needed to be able to run Photoshop. After downloading VMWare Server and installing that we then installed a copy of Windows XP Pro into a virtual machine and added Photoshop to that install. Firing up XP and running Photoshop full screen under VMWare it was not all that much slower than when it was running natively on his original XP system. Appparently when you run a VMWare virtual machine full screen under Linux it switches to using the physical graphics hardware.

To test just what you can do using virtual machines we did the following, from the XP virtual machine I VPN'd into my SBS 2003 server at my office, then using RDP from the XP VM I logged onto my desktop computer, which is running Vista Ultimate RC2, so far so good. The previous day I had installed a beta copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and created a Virtual XP Pro system and a Windows 98SE virtual system. So we fired up Virtual PC 2007 and the Win98 virtual machine and you can see the screen dump of all this here.

Needless to say I was quite chuffed that it all just worked and was surprisingly speedy.