[Wlug] Linux Choix?

[Lee Keyser-Allen]

Colin,

No need to apologize.

It may help you to understand what Parallels does, though, so you can
figure out whether it's appropriate for you.

The first piece of information that may be helpful is that, while it
was originally for the Mac, and its best supported platform is still
the Mac, it can run on both Windows and Linux.

What Parallels (and software like it) does is to create a virtual
computer that can run on your currently installed OS. VMWare is (I
think) the commercial pioneer in this field, and is perhaps still the
most well known.

What this means, in practice, though is that you are not really
getting away from Windows, since you are actually running a full copy
of windows in its own sandbox. Think of it as running a dual-boot
machine, except that you don't have to reboot your native OS to start
running the 'Virtual' one.

The advantage of this is that you can run virtually *any* windows app
(including most games ... although the performance can suffer) in your
Linux (or NT/XP or Mac) machine.

Generally speaking, however, this is not really a final solution for
most people. You still are running windows, and as such must pay for
the license and deal with the flakiness. It is sometimes a reasonable
interim step when you have applications that simply do not play well
(or at all) on Linux.

There are also side-benefits with this sort of setup, involving easily
saving and restoring configurations and operating environments, and
from what I've seen of Parallels, the nested OS is still pretty
responsive (this is in sharp contrast to the first time I ran VMWare
about 7 years ago ... it was not fast, although it was *very* cool :)
)

I hope that that is a (relatively) clear explanation of how that
works. Feel free to e-mail me on or off list if you have any other
questions.

Cheers,

Lee

On Nov 17, 2007 10:59 PM, Colin Novick <c-novick-1 at alumni.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Apologies. Deepest even.
>
> Before anyone needs to chastise me I looked it up and OS X is more Next and
> other sources than Linux per se.
>
> Apparently Parallels on OS X will run Win and Lin, but the underlying OS is
> OS X and does not imply that ArcGIS would be stably emulated by a Linux
> machine emulating Win.
>
> Sorry.
>
> Hope not to have too terribly offended in my ignorance.
>
> Colin
>
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-- 
Lee Keyser-Allen
(lkeyser at alum.wpi.edu)