I got a copy of Microsoft's VirtualPC 2004 yesterday and installed it on a
Windows XP Pro computer at home. It currently only supports Windows 2000
or later as a host OS now. But if someone can tell me how to get video
editing, DVD burning and HDTV viewing done in Linux, I'm more than happy
to listen!

I then installed Fedora Core 1 on it. Rather, I'm in the midst of that.

It's gone pretty easily so far. You tell it you want a new virtual 
machine, running "Other" for an OS, set up its virtual hard disk (a file 
on the host machine), put in a bootable CD and click Start.

The virtual machine starts, and you get a BIOS screen. It's a little 
startling to see a BIOS from another brand than what's in the machine, let 
alone in a window on the desktop, but you get used to that.

The CD boots and Fedora begins its installation. I set it to automatically 
partition and install the Workstation software suite. The VM reports a 
generic S3 (I think) video card to the BIOS, and Fedora's graphics seem to 
work OK.

One strange thing is that installation took a very long time. Like over 
two hours long. The CPU was idle most of the time, so I'm chalking this up 
to inefficient CD-ROM emulation layers so far.

After installation and a re-boot, I logged in and ran /sbin/ifconfig.

Another thing new to this person who's never run VM software before was 
seeing a new virtual network card, with some made-up MAC address get an IP 
address from my DHCP server. So now my machine has two IP addresses.

The first thing I tried to do was update the system with up2date. So far 
it's taken several hours because the site hosting updates is so glacial.

If anyone has tips on speeding that process, I'd be very grateful.

I also installed FreeDOS on another VM, then quickly added Quake for DOS. 
It seems to work, except for sound. Sound also does not work in Fedora as 
of yet.

If there's interest, I'll post more as I do more.

Chris Schumann


_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list