[svlug] Bagels and 'Buntu7.10 - Saturday installfest

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Bill Ward wrote:
> On 10/18/07, Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am going to need to be able to implement virtualization of Windows <choke>
>> for the public middle school that our community is supporting with FOSS.
>> The school has received a grant of $5, 000.00 plus "$23,000.00 worth" of
>> Adobe Photoshop and video editing software <gag> that they need to use in
>> order to qualify for the money again next year.  Our choice (as a FOSS
>> community) is to let them just go ahead and install Windows natively and
>> blow away the existing Linux partitions; or to virtualize Windows so that at
>> least the teachers and students have the option of choosing and comparing
>> Cinelerra and Open Media Editor and Kino and Blender and Jahshakah versus
>> the prorprietary options.
> 
> Maybe you can get VMWare to donate the requisite software?

VMWare Server is free, though you don't get cool features like 'unity' 
which lets you effectively run the guest OS 'rootless' such that guest 
windows just appear as (strange-looking ^_~) windows on your normal 
desktop.  Though I'm not sure if VMWare supports this in the Linux 
host/Windows guest configuration, anyway.

Another option would be to dual-boot, but that's less convenient.  Also, 
with VMWare, you can set up a pristine system, apply patches, install 
just the software you want, take a 'snapshot'[1], and roll back to the 
snapshot later if the OS starts misbehaving (or someone breaks it).

There's also qemu (open source, unlike VMWare), but I have no experience 
with it, so I'll leave that to someone else.

	-brian

[1] Possibly easier would be to simply make a backup copy of the virtual 
disk file and related configuration files at that point, and store it in 
a safe place.