On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 05:31:48PM +0100, Ged Ridgway wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> >upon the next FSL release: we propose, hopefully, instead of using
> >Cygwin, to use VMPlayer (freely available) within which Linux would run,
> >and a pure linux version of FSL). This should be just as easy to setup
> >and use as Cygwin, if not easier. We would be interested in comments on
> >this plan from anyone out there.
>
> Do you know how Linux under a virtual machine compares in terms of
> performance with Linux from a live-CD? Since there are already
> well-maintained Debian packages for FSL, it might be fairly easy to
> distribute a Debian/Knoppix live FSL CD (which would also allow an
> easy permanent installation of a Linux system pre-loaded with FSL).
Out of curiosity I tried to install a minial system (using Debian etch).
I installed the base system which is just a shell and all required basic tools
(yes, vim is part of it). In additon I installed an X server and a
lightweight desktop (XFCE). The desktop is simply nice to have,
especially for (former) windows users. XFCE has the advantage that it
requires little memory, which could be an issue when the VM host does
not have much RAM installed.
Finally I installed the Debian packages of FSL (excluding fsl-feeds).
The resulting VM occupies 1.3 GB of diskspace and approx. 500 MB as a
bzip2-compressed tarball. This is quite heavy, but still less than a
Live-CD image.
Another advantage of a VM image is that all users would have to download
such an image only once as it can be updated easily via the package
management system. This means both the operating system and FSL.
A nice addition to this minimal system could be a Samba server for easy
access to the VM filesystem from the Win32 host.
Cheers,
Michael
--
GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke
ICQ: 48230050
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