Quote:
|
Originally Posted by TteFAboB
What's the purpose of this thing?
Damn you Nick Burns, I mean, Subman.
|
You can run a virtual OS inside of Windows. Suppose you had a Linux app you wanted to run - run Linux while doing other things in Windows.
Want to play with Windows 95 or WIndows 2000 or even another copy of Windows XP running 'inside' Windows XP? You can! Ever wanted to see how a program is going to affect your windows XP installation before you run it on XP? Again - you can.
The short of it is - it creates a shell that doesn't let the other host OS know that it is not running natively. THe only downside is - you lose some speed since WIndows must now maintain two OS's at once - but if you have the shell in the forground on Windows - then it is not noticeable - that is how efficient it is.
Linux or alternate OS's however will run slower since they are making non standard disc calls, etc as compared to Windows, but it does work. I compiled a copy of Gentoo into a shell once. Only trick is - you can't use virtual HD space for the virtual HD - you have to dedicate 'real' hard drive space to the Linux install, even though you will be able to run ext2/ext3 etc on top of NTFS so don't think you need to run it on its own seperate partition - Linux will function and not know its ext3 etc is running from 'within' an NTFS partition.
It is hard to explain without getting technical, so I hope you get the jist of it.
-S