I've been playing with a spare PC here at the house, a Celeron 500Mhz with
192Mb of memory and I stuck a 60gig drive on it.  I grabbed my latest
Mandrake (only 8.2) and installed on it.  The first time through I just
wanted to see how far I could get on using VMWare on the top of Linux and
see how responsive it was.  I then went through and popped in a NIC that I
had laying around -- a cheapie that was crap in a Windoze box.  In Linux it
seems to run fine.  I've been playing around quite a bit.  Last night I
installed Office 2000 onto the NT 4.0 (all I have laying around) guest OS
while playing MP3's on XMMS in Linux.  The thing never missed a beat.  It
was absolutely amazing to watch . . . even with some minor visualizations
turned on the NT side of things in VMWare seemed pretty snappy.

That being said, I'm still battling some problems with this setup.  The
screen  driver for NT (through the VMWare tools install) isn't allowing the
screen to display properly.  When it displays the test pattern, I get the
color bars but no text on the color bars.  If I keep that screen
resolution/color depth (800x600 - 65K) the system will boot up and display
just the background colors on the login screen and the mouse will leave a
"trail" across the entire screen.  I have to boot back down to VGA
resolution in NT and take out the driver to get it to come back to life.  I
don't know if this is an issue with VMWare or my XWindows configuration.
I'm leaning towards the XWindows . . . but I havent' wanted to devote a lot
of time to it because ultimately this PC won't the one I run everything on.
 I'm wanting to get a new PC with some speed and that  . . .  Aldi is
having that Medion (? spelling) PC coming out after Thanksgiving, and it
looks $attractive$.  In some ways I'd love to build from scratch . . . so
I'm still up in the air on that.

Anyway -- I'm very impressed with my setup so far.  I think I'll throw a CD
burner on that PC and see how it works with that.  How often do you
typically "coaster" a CD in Linux?  

-- Bradley Miller