I finished my first pass at setting up vmware to work with radmind. I built my final winxp image -- before I made the image, I did "clean up" from the winxp side, to remove temporary files, browser cache, etc, and then did clean up from the vmware side, to reduce the size of the disk images as much as possible. I also found that by saving the image in a shut down, rather than suspended state, it saved about a GB of space. I ended up with an image that was 3.62GB in size -- about half in 1 2GB chunk.
It would probably be better from an end-user standpoint to dist out the image in a suspended state -- the user could then start up the system ready-to-go and already in the correct mode. As it is now, the user has to wait for Windows to start up and then switch to unity mode (or full screen). Unfortunately, the image would frequently kernel panic when it started up -- not always, but frequently. I spent some time trying to diagnose the problem. I thought it might be related to either rebuilding or not rebuilding the virtual machine's unique identifiers inside VMware, but I tried it both ways without success. Oh, well. Why should working with winxp be convenient anyway.
After I finished, I sent a message to the faculty member that the image was ready to go and that I did not know what else needed to be done. Now we'll try it for a few days and see what else he wants to do.
The new Integrated Science Building is currently being outfitted and is planned to be iMacs running MacOS with vmware to provide access to Windows. I got a notice about Apple cutting the pricing on some 24inch iMacs and passed it along, so the ISB bought 52 of them to outfit the new Computer Resource Center in the building. It's going to be an awesome new lab, with 24inch iMacs.
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
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