DISQUS

Oracle AppsLab: Virtual Adventures

  • Drew · 1 year ago
    Not sure there's a compelling reason to fire up a virtual machine to run wine or ies4linux. Try http://mike.kronenberg.org/?p=63

    Having said that. ies4linux and wine don't really give you a complete sense of an end users Windows/IE/yourwebsite experience.
  • Jake · 1 year ago
    @Drew: Very cool, I didn't know about ies4mac. Sounds like a resource piggy. I got the XP machine running fine on Mac now, and running it is pretty painless. I like the VM solution.
  • Venkataramanan S · 1 year ago
    I have been playing around with virtual machines for a very long time. Started with VirtualBox about a month back. VirtualBox has been the simplest to configure and use. VirtualBox OSE is definitely something you don't want to try out. Its very buggy. However, the licensed version shipped with the installer is much better. None the less, its still buggy. The best part of VirtualBox is that the images are very portable. My friend installed Solaris on his mac using VirtualBox and I had to copy the image to get it running on my x86-64. Sweet.

    I have been trying out legacy operating systems on VirtualBox, like Slackware 96. Installation started but then it conked. Had some luck with Red Hat 5.2, but the installation hung at the last stages. Planning to try out BeOS and OS2Warp.

    The other interesting think what I did, is a nested virtual machine installation. Installed Windows XP on openSuse 10.3 x86-64 host. Then installed Virtual Box on Windows XP and then tried Ubuntu with Windows XP as guest. The installation did not start. Not sure why. Will give this a shot again.

    The other good thing about VirtualBox is that it is very scalable. I could run Windows XP, Solaris 10 and Slackware 11 at the same time on openSuse 10.3 host without actually having any lag. My configuration is good. Here is my configuration:

    AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000
    6GB Dual Channel DDR2 667
    250 + 200 GB SATA HDD
    openSuse 10.3 x86-64 (Kernel Recompiled)
    (Dual Booted with Slackware 12)

    Yes, I am a Slackware and openSuse fan. Slackware is the quickest and openSuse is very well suited for a desktop. I strongly recommend you try these out.

    And, ies4linux works beautifully on my openSuse box. Not sure whats wrong with your installation.
  • Jake · 1 year ago
    @Venkataramanan: I think what's wrong with my ies4linux is that I have way less computing power than you do. I agree with you overall assessment that VB works well, and I did test the portability of images with Rich and between my own machines.

    I like your idea of running old O/S. I'd like to see a Win 3.11 or NT 3.51 instance running on a Mac OS X host or something similar. That would rock.
  • Warren · 1 year ago
    I've been using VMWare Fusion on my macbook pro for probably 6 months now, and I'm pretty happy with it... I've run both XP and Linux images and they work quite well.

    They are even pretty responsive if I'm not running anything too memory hoggish on the native side...

    Too bad Oracle VM isn't available for the Mac yet...
  • Jake · 1 year ago
    @Warren: If you follow Mix at all, you'll know you're not in the minority wanting better support for Mac.

    I'm very happy with VirtualBox. VMWare is great too, but VB works great. I can Vista on my Macbook and use OS X and Vista at the same time without any performance issues. Nice.
  • João Costa · 1 year ago
    Its just for IE, but you don't need any virtualization to run multiple versions of IE.
    From IE 3 to IE 6 you can use this app from Trendsoft http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE :)

    I hope it helps.
    João
  • Jake · 1 year ago
    @João: Thanks, this is actually what ies4linux installs to run on Wine. I guess I should have figured out for myself that it exists natively for Windows.