Andy Zbikowski wrote:

> > One potential problem for a production envireonment, it doesn't speak the
> > microsoft networking language, so you can't use it for SMB mounts.  You
> > can however use linux to mount the windows (or hopefully samba) shares
> > into a directory that Windows can see.
>
> I'm slightly confused. You're saying that you can't mount windows shares in
> VM, but that if you mount them through Linux the VM can see them?
> EWWWWWWWWWWWWW! That really sucks. VMWare doesn't have such limitations. The
> Windows VMWare clients work fine for sharing files and mapping network
> driver. I've even had both NT and Windows 2000 domain controllers as well as
> Citrix terminal servers working under VMWare. VMWare is an excellent
> testbed. (Undoable disks are quite useful.)

That's basically it, VMWare is much better if you really want to do more than
just run some apps.  Mine was a cost consideration and since I don't want to do
anything but run some "legacy" applications it didn't matter much to me that it
doesn't know about MS networking.

> A virtual disk is a file on the host file system that appears as a physical
> disk drive to a guest operating system. The file system can be on the host
> machine or on a remote computer. When you configure a virtual machine with a
> virtual disk, you can install a new operating system onto the disk file
> without the need to repartition a physical disk or reboot the host. Virtual
> disks are limited to a maximum of 2GB. The actual file used by the virtual
> disk starts out small and grows to the maximum size as needed.

Win4Lin installs a copy of Windows into your home directory along with any
other software you install inside windows.  It's just a regular directory as
far as linux is concerned, and it (and everything in it) is accessible like
usual.  To windows it's a self contained file system.  Permissions and such
being mapped by the VM.

> In VMWare you can configure the VM to give access to hardware that you have
> configured. (Paralell and Serial ports.) You should be able to install your
> printer (even those darn winprinters) or palm pilot drivers under VMWare and
> get them working (haven't tried this myself, been using network printing for
> some time now, even at home.)

Win4Lin offers pretty much the same functionality here.  I can do all sorts of
things to my printer that Linux doesn't.  I was wondering if you could get a
WinModem to work by some method like this.

> Though if you can browse the web I can't imagine why you can't get SMB
> shares working. Even the Win4Lin site states that it Supports Windows TCP/IP
> networking, so everything should work. You may need to find the registry
> hack to make Windows use plaintext passwords to access samba shares (or
> change security to share in smb.conf, or make your samba server part of the
> NT/2000 domain and bypass the issue all together)

I don't know... I haven't tried it seriously.  I know it won't do the netbeui
but you're right there doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't get it to
work.  Maybe it's time to fire up the samba server again and see.

Charlie