Technical Details

I’ve been pretty critical of VMWare, and I’ve been using Virtual PC since before Microsoft got their grubby little hands on it. Virtual PC in my opinion is generally easier to use and worked very well up until recently and for the most part supported Linux very well.

This weekend I tried to install Fedora Core 7 on Virtual PC 2004 (on my laptop) and of course it didn’t work, so I figured, hey I’ll upgrade to VPC 2007. After upgrading to 2007 the Virtual PC networking no longer worked so VPC was no longer of any use, after trying to fix the problem and jumping through all the stupid MS’isms I gave up and thought I’d downgrade to 2004, of course the network was totally screwed for 2004 as well. During this I also tried to install Fedora Core 5 on 2007 which I have working on another VPC instance on another machine, of course it doesn’t work anymore. Now if I was a conspiracy nut I’d be thinking MS has purposely tweaked VPC to prevent Linux from running, the jury is still out on this one.

So VMWare to the rescue, having finally setup VMWare server for Linux and getting all manner of OS’s running and being quite happy, I switched to VMWare and it worked perfectly, bye bye VPC.

So MS you may be giving VPC away, but if it can’t do the job what’s the point, I’d rather pay VMWare for a working product any day, MS’s loss is VMWare’s gain.