[wquiles]

System info: See my SIG.

Background: I had a dual boot Xandros 2.0 and XP Pro install on my system since I need to run MS Windows aps every week (sometimes daily) but the rebooting got two tiring so I reverted to a single OS, which is Xandros 2.0. To run the MS apps, I am using a "backup" PC (PIII 1Ghz with 512MB ram) to runs the MS aps and I use VNC between the two PC's so that from my workstation I can "use" the backup PC running the MS apps. I have a GigE network between the computers so I can transfer files very quickly between them as I need to.

Situation/Problem: The backup PC is too slow and I am not fully utilizing the Duallies' power. I want to install VMware on my dually and have at two virtual machines: one being my Xandros 2.0 and the second one a Win2K so that I can really take advantage of the AMD dually. I am also beguining to outgrow Xandros 2.0 and I want to experiment with other Linux OS distributions, but I don't want to loose my working setup to try something new. Since I also want to test using other Linux OS's and also want to play with WinXP Pro again, VMware is PERFECT for this situation. Affording the VMware is not a problem for my budget, so I only need advice from you on how to best deal with my situation.

Questions:
1) I do NOT want to have my host OS be MS-based for many obvious reasons, so I want my host OS to be linux. For the Linux host OS I want a something smaller, faster, secure (being reasonable here), and that uses the minimum amount of resources compared to my resource-heavy Xandros 2.0. My ideal Linux host OS would not have to be patched, upgraded, re-booted too often and would be based on a stable release. I am open to considering a 2.6-based host OS, but I can live with an 2.4-based Kernel just as well - stability is very important to me in my scenario and I am also willing to install a workstation or server Linux version. I will be running (to start) Xandros 2.0 and Win2K Pro on top of the Linux host OS. Given this, what 1 or 2 Linux OS's what work well with VMware would you recommend for me to use as my host OS?

2) Some have sucesfully installed Xandros 2.0 as a virtual machine even though VMware does not officially support Xandros 2.0 as a guest OS. Do you know what (if any) steps do I need to follow in order to do the same? Any tricks, special steps that were required to install Xandros 2.0 as a guest OS?

3) An alternate solution in my case is to simply keep my current Xandros 2.0 host OS and install VMware on top of it and then install/create a virtual Win2K machine. However, Xandros 2.0 is not a supported host OS and it does have a lot of special tweaks to the Linux Kernel which are not standard (which of course is what makes Xandros such a pleasure to use!). Looking at my system usage resources I can see that Xandros is a little bit of a "hog" due to the multiple eye-candy and extra features - that is why I feel that it is a poor choice for a host OS. Do you agree/disagree, and would you have any other suggestions?

Sorry for the long post. Thanks in advance!

[kaltag]

Debian/slackware/Gentoo all come to mind for stripped down base OSes. If you're still pretty new to linux Gentoo is probably not the best choice it's a long and involved install but it is fast as all get out since you can compile EVERYTHING for your specific architecture and maintaining it is easy with portage. Debian is basically the same thing as Gentoo except it downloads binaries instead of compiling. I would recommend slackware for you. Of all the distros I've used slack "just works" I have only had one dependency problem and that was quickly solved. I have also run vmware in slack and it worked perfectly from the getgo. The install is pretty straight forward as long as you know how to partition drives from the CLI. I ran Win XP on my XP2000 with 384MB of RAM ontop of slackware and it ran a little bit faster than my k6-2 550 mhz ran it which I consider to be acceptable unless you're doing something like maya or autocad.

[wquiles]

thanks kaltag. although a long install, I have been looking for a good excuse to try Gentoo - now I have the perfect reason