Hi all,

I have used VMWare to emulate WinXP inside Linux (apparently the other
way round is also used?). This was a standard desktop computer (for
stimulus delivery machines things ar probably more complicated), but
here are my £ 0.02
> (1)software that needs administrator rights to install. This bypass the
> benefits of limited rights account
>
This is just a matter of the sysadmin preparing a VMWare image for
everyone that has all the software installed, I guess. The VMWare
sandbox approach is nice, but installing programs would preferably be
done a. only once and b. by one person.
If it is possible to separate the virtual machine (+installed programs)
from the virtual hard drive contents, this would not be very difficult,
would it?
> (2)Most of the time, the word "corrupted" is use wrongly. What happens is
> userA overwrite a.dll version 3 with version 5, then userB finds that his
> software that uses a.dll version 3 stop working and call it corrupted or
> vice-versa.
> There two problems are very difficult so solve with only one OS image.
>
Again, this is less of a problem when there is one virtual machine (with
all necessary programs installed), and if the sysadmin solves the dll
dependencies.
>> It will be more inaccurate, that's for sure. But how much, dunno.
>>
>
> That is the crunch of the problem: is the inaccuracy introduced significant?
>
That of course depends on your own criteria as well as on the machine's
accuracy. For the machine part, it would be best to ask the VMWare people?
> > I don't think you can add any hardware from the VM-OS that is on top
>
> My worry is the virtualization software cannot virtualize the hardware. See
> Microsoft Virtual PC for example, the description back in 2004 says that
> virtual machines cannot use USB device that requires its own driver.
>
There are quite a few informative WWW-pages on the use of VMWare and
hardware support (wikipedia, vmware's site, or try google "vmware sound
usb"). But what do you mean by virtualising the hardware? If it means
that you want your virtual machine to act like it has a usb port while
your physical machine hasn't, that is not going to work.
In VMWare, the hardware is very much `standardised', eg for the sound
support it is either "have sound card" or "don't have sound card".
Signals from your guest OS for the physical sound card are passed
through the virtual machine. That means that many settings for specific
hardware cannot be used (your VMWare machine by default even starts with
a 640x480 screen: if you want to use the features of your video card,
you need to install something extra, think it's called vmware-tools).
So yes: if you have usb, sound, internet, ... working in linux, you can
let VMWare know and it will be present on your virtual machine (but you
will probably have fewer features than you would on your physical
machine), and no: you cannot make up hardware and let VMWare emulate
complete devices.

Hope it helps,
Alle Meije