Day 24: Fallout 3 and Fallout 3 GotY for 30% Off!
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You know - after spending weeks on getting any flavour of Linux to cooperate with my wireless card & notebook - we went to my roommate's office and snagged the copy of VMWare 4 that they'd bought for him (that he had utterly no need for, prefering to dual boot.)
So far, I've been less than impressed with 4's handling of Linux. 3 did so many things so much better.
On the plus side, the VESA layer it provides is /much/ faster than it used to be. Using the Linux FB driver under Gentoo - screen scrolling was /much/ faster than it was booting directly into the OS and using the pseudo-vesa that my GF4 Go provides natively. Bridged networking worked beautifully as well, without requiring a single bit of setup on my part, other than ticking the 'Bridged networking' radio button.
Minuses?
So far, I've tried both Gentoo and Redhat (to see if I could duplicate the odd behaviour I got in Gentoo,) as a virtual os - and.. they have a habit of COMPLETELY IGNORING what the VMWare BIOS tries to tell it what the virtual PC has. Instead - they somehow manage to, every time, query my REAL BIOS for too many things. Including hard drive setups - which leads me to....
Hard Drives. What a nightmare this has been so far! Somehow since (as I said,) it's ignoring the phoenix bios of the virtual machine and managing to query my real BIOS, I can't set only certain partitions to be 'on' in a hard drive if I'm using a real harddrive for my virtual machine. If I tell VMware that only the 2nd and 3rd partitions are on the emulated drive, the first one still comes through as plain as day. Older versions never suffered from this behaviour. If I told it only to use partition 2 and 3 then /only/ partitions 2 and 3 were shown as existing to the linux install (and they were renumbered /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 respectively.)
No proble, I can just use drive images, right? Well, since Linux is somehow bypassing the VM's bios and discovering my real hardware - I have yet to be able to get a HD image to actually -EXIST- to Linux. It's kind of hard to install or work on a hd that doesn't exist. Oops.
Also - I found out the hard way to leave the 'Persistant: All changes are immediately written to disk' option unchecked. Gotta leave the whole Advanced>> option of a hard drive empty. Why? ANY setting there (write changes immediately, or never write changes,) cause the same behaviour. VMWare only /pretends/ that it's writing things to disk. Shut down the VM and my entire Linux installation simply disappeared. Oops.
The USB support seems to work decently enough - though when you hotplug a USB device for the first time, the Windows 'Install Driver' dialog pops up, insisting you install the new hardware 'VMWare USB Device'. No problems there - except when you're running in full screen. You never see the dialog, and the VM simply seems to freeze. Ooops again.
I can't make any comments on sound or anything. My live CDs all detected and installed the modules for the emulated soundchip just fine - but no linux install I've done has ever actually been able to install a kernel module for the soundcard yet - the same holds true for the network! Bah. I'd probably do well to test /that/ on something more stable though - Gentoo and Fedora both have a habit of giving me post-install problems to work out.
But hey - the VESA support in VMWare... it's faster than my GF4 Go for a 1024x768 framebuffer display!
But not faster than my Ti4600...
So far, I've been less than impressed with 4's handling of Linux. 3 did so many things so much better.
On the plus side, the VESA layer it provides is /much/ faster than it used to be. Using the Linux FB driver under Gentoo - screen scrolling was /much/ faster than it was booting directly into the OS and using the pseudo-vesa that my GF4 Go provides natively. Bridged networking worked beautifully as well, without requiring a single bit of setup on my part, other than ticking the 'Bridged networking' radio button.
Minuses?
So far, I've tried both Gentoo and Redhat (to see if I could duplicate the odd behaviour I got in Gentoo,) as a virtual os - and.. they have a habit of COMPLETELY IGNORING what the VMWare BIOS tries to tell it what the virtual PC has. Instead - they somehow manage to, every time, query my REAL BIOS for too many things. Including hard drive setups - which leads me to....
Hard Drives. What a nightmare this has been so far! Somehow since (as I said,) it's ignoring the phoenix bios of the virtual machine and managing to query my real BIOS, I can't set only certain partitions to be 'on' in a hard drive if I'm using a real harddrive for my virtual machine. If I tell VMware that only the 2nd and 3rd partitions are on the emulated drive, the first one still comes through as plain as day. Older versions never suffered from this behaviour. If I told it only to use partition 2 and 3 then /only/ partitions 2 and 3 were shown as existing to the linux install (and they were renumbered /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 respectively.)
No proble, I can just use drive images, right? Well, since Linux is somehow bypassing the VM's bios and discovering my real hardware - I have yet to be able to get a HD image to actually -EXIST- to Linux. It's kind of hard to install or work on a hd that doesn't exist. Oops.
Also - I found out the hard way to leave the 'Persistant: All changes are immediately written to disk' option unchecked. Gotta leave the whole Advanced>> option of a hard drive empty. Why? ANY setting there (write changes immediately, or never write changes,) cause the same behaviour. VMWare only /pretends/ that it's writing things to disk. Shut down the VM and my entire Linux installation simply disappeared. Oops.
The USB support seems to work decently enough - though when you hotplug a USB device for the first time, the Windows 'Install Driver' dialog pops up, insisting you install the new hardware 'VMWare USB Device'. No problems there - except when you're running in full screen. You never see the dialog, and the VM simply seems to freeze. Ooops again.
I can't make any comments on sound or anything. My live CDs all detected and installed the modules for the emulated soundchip just fine - but no linux install I've done has ever actually been able to install a kernel module for the soundcard yet - the same holds true for the network! Bah. I'd probably do well to test /that/ on something more stable though - Gentoo and Fedora both have a habit of giving me post-install problems to work out.
But hey - the VESA support in VMWare... it's faster than my GF4 Go for a 1024x768 framebuffer display!
But not faster than my Ti4600...