Vista RC1 in a VM
Saturday, 16 September 2006
I got Vista RC1 running with a VMWare Workstation 5.5 virtual machine today. The graphical install doesn't work with VMWare out of the box (it sticks on the initial "loading files" screen).
Fortunately echelon9 posted a workaround on the VMWare forums.
Once you've done all that you can do the next most important thing:
Fortunately echelon9 posted a workaround on the VMWare forums.
- Stop the virtual machine.
- Edit the virtual machine's VMX file to include the lines (bottom of the file is fine):
svga.maxWidth = "640"
svga.maxHeight = "480" - Start the virtual machine. It will be stuck in VGA mode and the colors are limited so it won't look too hot, but the install should proceed just fine.
- Once your VM is booted into Vista, install VMWare Tools from the VM menu.
- Stop the virtual machine and remove the two lines from the VMX that you added earlier.
- Start the VM back up and you should be able to go into the Control Panel and change the resolution to something more usable.
Once you've done all that you can do the next most important thing:
MEDC 2006
Saturday, 13 May 2006
I just got back from Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded DevCon. It was hosted at The Venetian in Las Vegas. On Tuesday night they had Tao, this nightclub in the hotel, reserved exclusively for MEDC; it must have been the largest nerd conglomeration in a nightclub ever! We entered the SumoRobot challenge, where we had to program the AI in a Parallax SumoRobot modified to use the new .NET Micro Framework. I lost one of the IR sensors on the way into the ring and the poor robot was never the same after that.
Oh well. So CE6 looks like it will be very interesting. We got betas of it and the big news is they've ditched the 32/32 limit of past CEs (up to 32 processes each with a 32Mb 'slot' of virtual address space); in CE6 each process gets its own 2Gb of virtual address space and up to 32k processes can be running simultaneously. Addressing of physical RAM is still limited to 512Mb, but DLLs now go in a shared 512Mb region of virtual address space, instead of eating from the 32Mb ceiling on down like before. That should mean worrying about DLL crunch when developing applications for PPC/WM is a thing of the past, at least for a little while.
On the whole I was glad I went. Most of the sessions were enlightening to one degree or another, although there were a couple of nightmares. One session included the pearl of wisdom "the emulator is good for emulating things". Boy, I'm glad my manager was at that one instead of me.
Oh well. So CE6 looks like it will be very interesting. We got betas of it and the big news is they've ditched the 32/32 limit of past CEs (up to 32 processes each with a 32Mb 'slot' of virtual address space); in CE6 each process gets its own 2Gb of virtual address space and up to 32k processes can be running simultaneously. Addressing of physical RAM is still limited to 512Mb, but DLLs now go in a shared 512Mb region of virtual address space, instead of eating from the 32Mb ceiling on down like before. That should mean worrying about DLL crunch when developing applications for PPC/WM is a thing of the past, at least for a little while.
On the whole I was glad I went. Most of the sessions were enlightening to one degree or another, although there were a couple of nightmares. One session included the pearl of wisdom "the emulator is good for emulating things". Boy, I'm glad my manager was at that one instead of me.