VMWare Player Prebuilt Virtual Machines

January 6th, 2006 by Mark Rittman

Spotted
via

Duncan Lamb’s site: the
"Community Virtual
Machines" page on the VMWare website, where you can download prebuilt
virtual machines for use with VMWare and the new (free) VMWare Player,
including:

Of course there’s the standard "supported" VMs as well, including ones for
Ubuntu,
SuSE 10,
Oracle on Red Hat and
mySQL on SuSE. Sounds
like an excellent way to try out a new distro or development environment without
worry about laptop hardware compatibility.

Posted in Linux |

Comments

  1. Matt Topper Says:

    January 7th, 2006 at 12:12 am

    I already have a bunch of CentOS (free clone of Redhat) VMs built with the main Oracle tools and examples loaded on them. I want to post them on the net, but I can’t afford the bandwidth, anyone have a site I can post them on? or at least seed a BitTorrent download from?

  2. Mark Says:

    January 7th, 2006 at 7:05 pm

    Matt, do you have any idea how much bandwidth hosting the torrent would take? If it’s going to be no more than 5-10Gb I’d be happy to host it. But - are we able to redistribute the Oracle software? I somehow suspect not, that’s why XE was marketed as being “freely redistributable”…

  3. Howard J. Rogers Says:

    January 8th, 2006 at 3:44 am

    I hate pre-built VMware machines. You might as well just put up a big sign saying “Dialup Users Need Not Apply”, and another one that reads “Broadband Users: Brains Entirely Optional”.
    Half the battle with “trying out” any new distro is knowing its installation quirks and peculiarities. Three quarters of the battle with learning Oracle is installing the bloody thing! Take all that away, and what are you left with? A cutesey tool that lulls people into (a) a false sense of security and (b) a “can you do it for me?” mindset.
    In short, advertising the existence of someone else having expended all the effort for you is not a public service, in my book!

  4. Matt Topper Says:

    January 9th, 2006 at 5:36 am

    Mark, thats the problem, the VM is about 8GB in size. I’ve checked with some of the BI team and its fine to host them out there so long as they are used for development use and not for production environments (i.e. they follow the OTN download rules and regs). However, minimally it would probably be 100GB a month of bandwidth (minimum). I’m trying to find a hosting option, we’ll see what happens.

  5. Mark Says:

    January 9th, 2006 at 7:13 am

    Matt - wouldn’t hosting the torrent take up far less bandwidth than hosting the whole VM, surely that’s the point? I wouldn’t have thought the size of the target file would have come in to it (at least in the long term), but I’m no expert on Bittorrent.
    Good luck anyway

  6. Josh Mondragon Says:

    January 26th, 2006 at 6:21 am

    Howard - I disagree with your post. The beauty of a pre-built VM is that you don’t have to deal with all of the installation quirks! As a developer, if I’m curious as to whether my database abstraction layer will truely work with Oracle, I don’t want to spend the time setting up a dedicated server with an Oracle DB, I’ll leave that to the DBA!
    As with any of the other pre-built VM’s, the idea is to see if it will work for you before you expend the effort.

  7. Chris Hills Says:

    March 9th, 2006 at 8:25 pm

    Matt, I am willing to host your virtual machine(s) for you. Please get in touch!