RHEL and Windows simultaneously?

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Wednesday 12 April 2006 6:39 am, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I currently have my system booting Windows XP installed on a 40 Gig IDE
> drive.  I'm going to add an 80 Gig IDE drive to the system, and plan to
> RHEL on it.   I'd ultimately like to make RH the primary OS and be able
> to boot the existing installation of XP in a window within RH (not
> dual-boot).
>
> I presume there is a program within RH or the Linux world to permit this?
>
> I initially thought of VMWare, but that is a self-contained
> software computer.
>
> What are my options?
Right now, AFAIK, your options are VMWare, possibly QEMU, and Win4Lin. 
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/qemu/).
xen is not yet ready for Windows. The Microsoft VM is not ready for Linux. 

http://www.win4lin.com/
Win4Lin Pro runs WindowsXP as a process from Linux. I have not tried their 
pro product, but a while back I did use it with Windows 98. It was cheaper 
than VMWare and was lighter, but at $90 it is somewhat pricey considering 
that VMWare Player and VMWare server are now freely available. 

The general differences between VMWare and Win4Lin:
The guest OS under VMWare runs separately from the primary OS, and you can 
have a number of different OS's running. Win4Lin runs as a user process. It 
uses the native Linux file system, by default in your home directory 
although you can change that. 

In the future, Xen appears to be a very good alternative, but right now 
Virtual Iron may be another choice, and they are based on a modified Xen. 
They also are giving back to the Xen community.
http://www.virtualiron.com/news_events/releaseDate-4-03-06.cfm


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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