One other thing that I forgot to mention for anyone wanting Linux info or a good starting point is www.distrowatch.com this site has info on all Linux types and also Open Solaris and BSD as well.
Ubuntu is more mature and stable than OpenSolaris, which is still being aggressively developed. With this is mind make sure that you do NOT download OpenSolaris 200805 but the current 200811 release candidate. Upgrading from 200805 is somewhat painful as you need to do things by hand in the console. 200811 rc1b works pretty much perfectly already. Either Ubuntu or OpenSolaris with VirtualBox is a winning combination. Personally I run both
There's a lot of discussion and some basic comparisons, but what's really needed is an exhaustive comparison of performance benchmarks. Here's a couple that I've read. They should help to round things out a bit, especially the user comments. http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/11/37TC-virtual-workstations_3.html http://arstechnica.com/journals/app...x-move-over-parallels-and-fusion-its-sizzlean http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8880
I'd recommend against that, you should stay current due of the security flaws that continue to get exposed and exploited. I'm running SP3 and have auto-update turned off. The OS will notify you when new updates are available, but it will not override your auto-update setting.
I am not a specialist in security but if you do not use the XP installation for browsing and you enable NAT then how is this possible? The only thing it will be used for is to connect to the datafeed and run tradestation 2000i. Many thanks in advance, Maria
Thanks for these links. Through one of them I finished up reading an article whose writer suggested that the writing is on the wall for VMware if they continue in their present attitude ( similar to Microsofts ) and should be treated like the "walking dead". Although they are still number one the competition (and open source alternatives) is coming up fast. Personally I would not count them out though but changing founder and CEO never spells much good. It also gave me a good overview of the playing field, who is who and where did they come from. I did try Virtual Box on the Thinkpad Z61m under windows XP and did not have a few items working. But I did get the impression from the articles that 64 bit with virtualisation enabled has Virtual Box running better than on a 32 bit host OS. So I will find myself a 64 bit Linux OS, load it up on the T61p (64 bit CPU versus 32 bit CPU on the Z61m) and enable the virtualisation bit and see what that will do. I am learning heaps from all the responses, many thanks to all contributors making this (at least for me) a very interesting thread. Maria
Popular thinking is that Murphy was an optimist, which can only mean one thing -- he never used a Microsoft product! Seriously, at least install SP3. That way you'll get the refactored performance improvements that went into SP2.
Alot of Microsoft pundits were writing VMWare's obit when MS first released VirtualPC. That product is essentially dead today. How many other companies can you name that have survived an encounter with Microsoft, much less without government intervention? Going 64bit is great if everything you need to run is also 64bit. Not so fun if you need to run 32bit applications. The compatibility headaches often outweigh the incremental performance gains.
I run 64 bit Ubuntu and VirtualBox and it is really a lot faster. All my 32 bit applications are Windows applications so I run those in VirtualBox under Windows XP (32 bit version). I have 4 monitors so I use two of them for Ubuntu and have the Virtual Machine with Windows XP on the other two monitors. The machine is a quad core Intel with 8 Gigs of Ram and cost me under $1000 to build. I run IB TWS in Ubuntu and also Firefox and OpenOffice. I run Trade Ideas, Sierra Chart, etc in the WinXP virtual Machine. There is no real difference in speed between Vmware and VirualBox. I use VirtualBox because it runs better (more reliable) and is easier to use in Ubuntu. Everything just works. One BIG advantage of Virtual Machines is that you can back them up by just making a copy of the virtual disk! This takes less them 5 minutes for me. Then if my Windows XP virtual machine gets screwed up I just open the back up copy and use that. I can even move it to a different real machine and run it there if I want. Virtual Machine = totaly portable machine! Try removing your Windows XP disk drive from one machine and put it in another machine and see if it will run. That will never happen, MS wants you to be locked to the machine.