You should run VMWare Player on top of a small customizable distro. You need X, but you might not need a window manager at all. If you do need a Window manager (to move and resize the VMWare window), use the smallest one available. Do you want to run multiple VMs at the same time? Do you want to create VMs on this system? Which VMWare features do you need?
-Brian
On 2008-April-10, at 10:42 AM, tim@fractaldragon.net wrote:
On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:09:50AM -0500, Montana Quiring wrote:
Hello,
I would like to know if there is a super thin Linux distro that's single purpose is to fire up a VMware image when the computer boots up.
I would like to try doing something similar to the Cirtix Xen Desktop stuff that they showed off at Epic, but I would like the users Virtual Image to be on a USB flash or hard drive and the PC to have a very simple linux install that just loads the VMWare image when the machine is started up.
Any suggestions?
I'm thinking of going the "Linux From Scratch" route if there isn't anything already out there.
Hi Montana,
What about some of the CD or USB-based distros, such as Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux? Either should be easily customizable.
Puppy will load entirely into a ramdisk, dropping you directly into a lightweight desktop. It also can be set to save changed or new files to another session on a CD, or onto DVD; when rebooting, all the new bits are loaded on startup. I've used this for a simple firewall setup where I didn't want to write to the hard drive at all.
Cheers, Tim _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable