VMware includes a range of server and workstation virtualisers for 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms, together with supporting tools. It is well-established and comprehensive. Much of the VMware range is commercial software, but VMware Player and the relevant tools are free of charge. It is published by VMware, Inc.
The author has run this Virtual Machine under VMware Player, on an AMD Athlon XP1700+ processor with 512MB of memory, and considers that its performance is acceptable on that configuration. A more powerful system is recommended if possible.
See the VMware website for VMware Player downloads.
Under some Linux configurations, there may be problems with installing or starting VMware Player. Work-arounds are available.
You first need to obtain the OVF Tool program, available from VMware's Open Virtualization Format Tool page. The OVF Tool User Guide contains instructions for installing and running the OVF Tool on Windows, Linux and Macintosh host computers.
Use ovftool to convert GNUstep-VM-0_9.ovf from OVF to VMX format. You need to run it in a DOS window (Windows) or a terminal window (Linux), e.g.:
ovftool http://www.rstonehouse.co.uk/extras/GNUstep-VM-0.9/GNUstep-VM-0_9.ovf GNUstep-VM-0_9.vmx
(change the destination for the VMX image to suit your needs — note that it will be about 1.7GB in size).
Now start VMware Player:
To import the Virtual Machine into VMware Player, choose:
Open a Virtual Machine
as shown above, to bring up the Open Virtual Machine file browser:
Navigate to the GNUstep-VM-0_9.vmx (or other) file that you created above and click Open. This will add the newly created VM to your list of Virtual Machines.
You might now like to enable features such as Networking or Shared Folders, or change the memory allocated to the Virtual Machine; or you can do this later, at any time when the VM is not running. Select the new Virtual Machine and click on the Edit virtual machine settings button to bring up the Virtual Machine Settings screen.
On the Hardware tab, click any item to display its current status in the right-hand panel; you can edit these settings while the VM is not running. The +Add button gives you a menu of extra devices you can add; the -Remove button removes the currently selected device. In this example, we have added a Network Adapter, a Sound Card and a Serial Port to the basic set of devices.
One particularly useful change, if you have plenty of memory, is to allocate more of it to your VM. This can greatly improve performance. Go to the Memory section and use the slider control. You can allocate up to about half your machine's memory to the VM.
The Options tab provides further features, of which the most useful is shared folders — see the notes on Reading and Writing Files on the Host for further information.
When you are happy with the settings, click on the Save button then start your VM as described in Logging On to the System.
The VMware Tools are software extensions to your guest system. They are strongly recommended; they enable the system to run faster and more smoothly, and provide a number of useful features such as shared folders, the ability to resize the desktop and the ability to copy data between guest and host.
Currently, the VMware Tools are not built in to this release, so you will need to download them from VMware, Inc's web-site and install them yourself. See Upgrading VMware Tools.