> The other end of the spectrum is where you load the payware VMWare stuff.
> It allows you to emulate a complete new PC with it's own BIOS on Linux.
> Basically you run Linux, and then within Linux you can boot up one or even
> more virtual PCs which can run DOS, Windows, OS/2 Linux even and so on. It
> runs at almost native speeds from what I hear.
It runs at different speeds depending on the guest system. It's much
slower with w95 or 98. NT, however, runs faster than it would on the
real machine (better disk access, networking, simpler and more
efficient emulated hardware, and it does not attempt to switch to the
the real mode).
The real advantage is, as I see it, that VMWare does a kind of version
control for the emulated filesystem. In case of error, one can roll
their virtual disk back as needed, which can somewhat compensate for
notorious flakiness of certain guest systems.
--Gene