Dual boot or setup a VM

[J.Michael]

I am looking to install openSuSE and also keep my current Windows XP installation.

I was wondering should I Dual Boot or should I setup a VM with VMWare or OpenVZ or another one.

I also have 2 hard drives (2x40gb hard drives)


Thank you!
J.Michael

[abhishek456]

this depends on what purpose you use it for

If you wan't to do some experimenting then go for vmware[Vmware requires a lot of RAM to run your emulating OS which slows down the main OS(xp)]

but emulating OS on vmware is not that fast as it is run from harddisk installation

If you wan't to have real speed of your distro then go for harddisk installation

[J.Michael]

What would you recommand, I play on using windows for 1 or 2 games, maybe for photoshop/dreamweaver (depends if i can get something else for suse or not) maybe use wine if it supports photoshop cs2 and dreamweaver 8

thanks

[abhishek456]

it's now better go for harddisk install.

You can also find photoshop/dreamweaver like apps for your linux like those of GImp

best of luck

[gogalthorp]

Intense graphic games probably won't do well since there is no 3d Acceleration in the VM. But for any other purposes it will be fine.

VMware is not an emulation it is a sharing of the processor and memory.

You do need some resources though. You can probably get things to work in 512 meg but you will have a lot of disk thrashing which just slows things down. I recommend all the memory you can get.

I started with one gig running XP as a guest of Suse 10.1 64 bit via Vmware server. This worked but my compiles (I write Windows software) were a bit slow because even with a gig there was some swapping of cache. So I dropped in another gig and it runs like it was on its own machine. You can copy and paste between XP and Linux. If it was not for XP running in a window on the Suse Desktop you would not know it was a virtual machine.

If you must run graphic intense games dual booting is probably better. But for just about any other computer program VM's work great. Of course there is no reason you can't do both. There are instructions on the VMware site to use the Wnidows partition has the VM in VMWare serve. Looks like it is a little tricky to set up but it can be done.

[abhishek456]

sorry guys i mean VIRTUALIZATION not EMULATION

[sneeker]

lol, same, i have one and its no where near as good as on the HD. i mean, i had it on a vm, and i couldnt do ctrl+z or anything like that, so i installed it on another hard drive (which is what i recommend for you) and you can get cedega its 15 buks (USD) but 100 times better then wine in my opinion

[J.Michael]

thanks guys, yeah i have a pretty crappy computer celeron 2.2ghz 1 gb ram 2x 40 gb hard drives and on board graphics card/sound card(emachines computer)

So I would assume dual booting on is better. If i dual boot can i keep my current installation on WinXP?

[gogalthorp]

Actually that computer is just fine. As I said before though it is a question of how much you "need" to run high end games. Some games can be run in wine under Linux rather then in Windows. For productive software ie Photoshop and Dreamweaver. It is very nice to be able to copy and paste between OS's

[J.Michael]

The games I would want to play is Guild Wars, maybe Diablo II, and maybe Call of Duty possibly Counter Strike.
I think Diablo II is available on Wine but not sure about the others.
I do web site development so I use photoshop and dreamweaver. I'm sure if you consider these highend applications for my computer. So not sure VM or dual boot is better

Thanks for the help!