2010/1/26 Mark Knecht
<markknecht@gmail.com>
Hi,
OK - with the new machine up and running well enough to do some
work I really need to get some sort of virtualization going to see if
I can get around the fact that XP cannot be installed on this machine.
(at least not easily) I need to run TradeStation and I'd like to try
under Linux but Wine is ABSOLUTELY not an option.
I ran XP & TS on my older system (5 year old 3GHz AMD64) but it's
been a long time since I tried it. The performance was just OK. I
expect this machine may be acceptable.
To anyone familiar with this subject a few questions:
1) If I go the VMWare route is it vmware-workstation that I want?
AFAIK, vmware-workstation is the not license-free, so you'll have to invest some money in it. You might want to try vmware-player (if you want to go the vmware way). It is free, but it comes with restrictions. The major disadvantage is - you can't create your own images, you can only "play" them.
2) Are there any prebuilt XP images that would save me the hassle of
installing Win XP and just allow me to validate with my existing keys?
Is this the purpose of vmware-player? (which doesn't seem to have
fetch restrictions...)
3) In some ways the most important question is what are the Open
Source alternatives and how easy are they to set up?
There are (at least) three alternatives: VirtualBox (
http://www.virtualbox.org ,
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/VirtualBox ), kVM (
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page ,
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/KVM ) and Qemu (
http://www.qemu.org/ ,
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/QEmu )
In my opinion, VirtualBox is a very good (and open source) alternative to VMWare, and if all you need out of the virtualization software is to be able to run TradeStation, I'd definitely go for this one.
kVM and Qemu can be a bit confusing for a beginner (in virtualization), and, although they can offer better performance than vbox, I don't think they're worth the hassle for your specific needs.
For now I'm working from this list of documents and the index in
the upper right:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/VMware_Workstation
Thanks!
- Mark