Virtual PC, MSDN, and Whidbey Installs
Monday 25 August 2003
Virtual PC for Windows is now available for download by MSDN subscribers. I've not been able to get Linux Redhat 9 .0 working very well with VMware 3 so I thought I'd try Virtual PC (I know RH9 may work better with VMware 4 where it is a supported OS but we've not upgraded to that version of VMware yet). Installation went very smoothly, the only niggle being getting X Windows to work. I had to change the screen depth to 16 from 24 in the XF86Config file, by booting in single user mode (it was starting X automatically and displaying garbage otherwise), and then chose the "Generic Monitor, 1280x1024 @ 74 Hz" setting using the "Display Settings" GUI app so that I could increase the screen resolution to 1024x768. I'd read something which suggested that Virtual PC would support 16 and 32 bits, not 24, but I couldn't get it to work with depth set to 32. However my knowledge of X config is extremely limited so it may be well be possible. I suppose that now I know what to change I could choose these settings during installation. This MSDN KB article has some more information on installing Linux on Virtual PC.
Omri Gazitt mentions the usual trials of installing pre-alpha software, presumably the Whidbey release of .NET from what he writes, and suggests:
Nevertheless, my word of advice to folks who install our PDC bits: do it on a virgin machine that you are OK with wiping if you ever need to use it for something else...
Just what you need Virtual PC or VMware for.