parelells?

[chris200x9]

ok I'm a linux newbie so I don't want a just linux system, I heard that your parent OS determins your computers security (please correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway I'm building a PC and I want it to be secure, I do not game much but I do somewhat so mu question is how good would gaming through parellels be? Because what I am thinking of doing is getting a very secure minimalistic distrobution of linux and then running windows XP through it. Please tell me if this sounds like a good/reasonable plan.


thanks,
Chris

[Marsolin]

That's reasonable. VMware's high end ESX server platform essentially does the same thing. The main issues to watch out for are memory usage since you since you will be running multiple operating systems. Minimizing the services running on the Linux base to what you absolutely need will help.

Once you get the Windows XP VM setup I'd suggest making a backup of it. It's only a single file. That way you can easily start over if you get infected by malware.

From a performance standpoint, the primary limitations of running software in a virtual machine are with graphics and I/O. Graphics hardware acceleration is not supported in the VM, although most companies seem to be working on this. I/O can also be slow, which is another reason that having sufficient memory to reduce swap file usage is a good thing.

[valemon]

I don't think you will be able to handle 3D games with vmware. It is still experimental and tricky.