More Fun with VMWare
I know, I know. Damn that Perlow. Can‘t he come up with an “On the Desktop” column that doesn’t involve VMWare (http://vmware.com) or some kind of emulation of some kind or another? Well, yes, I could, but then you wouldn’t learn all the cool stuff I’m about to lay on you.
Thursday, August 10th, 2006
Now that VMware Server and VMware Player are completely free programs, either of those two packages should be an essential part of your Linux desktop suite. With VMWare, you can run other Linux distros, virtual Linux clusters, and even Windows. This particular article, though, is going to go down a road less traveled. No, we’re not gonna run Solaris or Vista in VMWare. We’re gonna run DOS!
The Joys of DOS
If you’re under 30, you probably don’t remember the joys of old DOS games and applications. What we do today with gigahertzes of CPU power, hundreds of gigabytes, of storage and gigabytes of RAM used to be performed with systems with a small fraction of those resources. A typical PC circa-1992 was based on the Intel 80386 or 80486, clocking out at 33 MHz with a 100 MB hard disk, and 4-8 MB of RAM. A powerhouse-machine, relegated to CAD engineers and Wall Street stock traders might have been a 66 MHz or 100 MHz box (perhaps an original Pentium) with a 200 MB disk and 16-32 MB of RAM, and there were very few applications that could even utilize that much mojo back then.
