[aprssig] New Open Source APRS Client Project

[Jason KG4WSV]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:08 AM, Brian Webster
<bwebster at wirelessmapping.com> wrote:
>
>        I tried the Virtual machine version last night with VMWare on my Dell
> Latitude laptop using a built in wireless card. It would not recognize the
> card and/or the network interface properly so I have no networking on the
> Virtual Machine.

There are a couple of ways to network a VM.  The one you apparently
used was to allow the VM to take over the host machine's network
hardware.

A better way, IMO, is to allow VMware to set up a configuration much
like you would use at home on a DSL router, and share that network
interface with the VM.  Sorry, I haven't done it in a while so I'm
even forgetting the VMware terminology.

I ran a linux VM on an XP laptop specifically because of this feature.
 Many laptops have proprietary wireless cards, so there are no open
source drivers (without NDIS wrappers, which can be tricky and are a
hack I don't particularly like).  Since i couldn't get linux drivers
to light the wireless NIC, I ran linux in a VM instead, and just let
XP deal with the hardware.

As far as resource utilization and performance goes: my laptop is 3 or
4 years old, and has a 30G hard drive.  1/30 of the hard drive isn't
really all that much space, and newer hard drives are larger.  As far
as other resource utilization, it usually comes down to a) RAM and b)
how often you switch apps.  If you tend to do one or the other (a VM
app or a host OS app) the host OS virtual memory manager will migrate
the resources to the currently active app (how long this takes depends
largely on how much RAM you have) so after this initial paging
activity you'll have decent performance.  If you tend to flip back and
forth a lot (or have resource intensive apps running in the
background), you may notice a performance hit.

-Jason
kg4wsv