Re: VMWare player

["Paul Breeze" dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxx (Redacted sender "paul.breeze" for DMARC)]

Dear Kari

All you say is true, but my experimenting so far shows this to be a much
cleaner and simpler way of running the virtual machine.

I have tried Unity mode but with that I am always bumping into the
console when tabbing between programs and in addition entering Unity
paints both my monitors grey which I do not like in the least. I could
fix that by not using an alternative shell in the guest but I have used
Litestep for about 15 years now and don't see why I should give it up
for VMWare, so I suppose I am being recalcitrant. However if you want
to use Unity to place programs in the start menu I seem to recall that
leads other problems (though I cannot now remember what) if like me you
want everything available through keyboard shortcuts. I cannot move
Unity programs to a second monitor either and Tabbing between Unity
applications and Host machine applications is flaky on my setup. If it
worked smoothly and was customisable, Unity would be wonderful. For me,
it doesn't and isn't.

Instead I have been using full screen with the toolbar but the toolbar
can be an irritant and this way of using VMWare involves too many key
strokes to switch between apps on guest and host to be really
comfortable. However it does give me the ability to move guest apps to
a second monitor which can be useful.

On the other hand VMWare-KVM gives me a single key to switch to and from
the virtual machine, no console in my Alt-Tab list of programs and no
toolbar. There are, of course, limitations such as you mention, but
when I am using the virtual machine for work, rather than just playing
with it, I do not really need to be able to interact with it. As far as
I can see -KVM offers the ability to run a guest in which VMWare is
completely invisible. I think I rather like that.


Best wishes

Paul

On 20/02/2016 16:10, Kari Eveli wrote:
Dear Paul,

This has been around for some time, but I am not sure that using it is a
good idea. You lose the controls that the basic player has, such as easy
access to Ctrl-Alt-Del, one click suspend, Unity mode, etc. You have to
use command-line controls to manage the machine. After all you can start
directly an XP program, e.g. NB9, from a Win 7 Start menu link in Unity
mode. I think this is even better.

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

*** Lexitec Online ***
Lexitec in English: http://www.lexitec.fi/english.html
Home page in Finnish: http://www.lexitec.fi/


However I have only today discovered a utility that comes with the
player called VMWare-KVM.EXE which can launch a virtual machine without
the usual toolbar and which allows a single key to toggle between the
virtual machine and the host. It has some limitations such as not
allowing the virtual machine to use multiple monitors but it seems to
offer a much cleaner way of running virtual machines than launching them
from the player or from a shortcut.