The more I play with Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 [virtualpcadditions, virtualpc2007], the more I appreciate the effort from MS, and the more I become disappointed with the Linux guest OS performance on my P4 Prescott-based WinXP machine.
I installed the SimplyMEPIS Linux distro in Virtual PC 2007, and tried to get the performance up to a level comparable to VMWare. Microsoft makes "Virtual Machine Additions for Linux" available for Virtual Server 2005, so I tried them in Virtual PC 2007.
The VM Additions are provided in RPM format, but MEPIS uses deb packages. To install the VM Addition RPMs, you'll need the app alien, which is included in MEPIS, as well as the kernel headers package. You'll also want to install the rcconf package.
Once you get the iso from MS, mount it and copy the files to a local folder. Do not run the vmadd-install.run script - most of the VM Additions are useless in Virtual PC. Instead, just install the kernel and X11 packages by opening a root terminal, and typing:
alien -icv vmadd-kernel-module-0.0.1-1.i386.rpm
alien -icv vmadd-kernel-x11-0.0.1-1.i386.rpm
/etc/init.d/vmadd start
You'll see an error regarding chkconfig, which is not included on debian-based distros. Just run lcconf, find vmadd in the list, and select it to run at startup.
Unfortunately, the VM Additions don't seem to have much a performance effect at all. As a matter of fact, the X11 driver is incompatible with recent versions of Xorg, including the one in MEPIS. The mouse driver works, if you copy it from /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/mouse_drv.o to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/mouse_drv.so, but it seems hardly worth the effort.
One thing that does help performance, however, is changing the Linux clock timing. In MEPIS, I was getting a bunch of weird double-character typing issues, as well as network stalls. Adding the parameter clock=pit to the kernel boot line in grub (or lilo) fixed both issues.
In conclusion, if you want a high performance Virtual Machine on a single core host, look elsewhere. However, if stability and ease of use are more important than speed, Virtual PC 2007 is a very nicely polished VM to try. Just don't bother installing the VM Additions for Linux.
I'd love to know how it runs on a dual core machine.
We are using Virtual Server 2005 R2 with SP on a dual core and the Suse 9 ent with additions are working nicely.
We had similar trouble trying to get Suse 10 Enterprise running with additions. The clock helped the keys, but we really need the mouse additons to let the mouse flow in/out of the vrmc control.
Would you know how to get this working on Suse 10 Enterprise or Knoppix 5?
http://www.novell.com/linux/
We would appreciate your help to try and get this done this week.
phil
As I mentioned in the post, I was using Virtual PC 2007, not Virtual Server 2005, so I'm not sure what the differences might be. I also didn't try SLED or Knoppix. That all said, did you try copying the mouse driver from the X11R6 directory to the xorg directory? This worked for me, though I did need to specifically enable the "mouse additions" setting in Virtual PC.
Good luck.
I installed KnoppMyth R5 on Virtual PC 2007, and added the virtual machine additions, using 'alien' as suggested. I also had the issue with multiple characters per key press, which was solved by the kernel argument.
Performance has slightly improved - directory listings scroll faster, for example. However, I could not get the mouse driver working for some reason, despite copying it as suggested. In fact, there didn't seem to be any new mouse_drv.* files on the system at all.
This was on an AMD Athlon 2.4 GHz 64-bit single-core, host OS Vista.
