Page 1 of 1

Running TW on a 'skinny' virtual machine

Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 5:12 pm
by petrosd
Has anyone run TW on a small virtual machine, probably a Win98 or WinXP VM or something small? I was thinking that it might be the easiest way to get around using it on non-Windows systems. If you have, can you share the experience, the OSes the VM can run in and the smallest size possible? Thanks

Re: Running TW on a 'skinny' virtual machine

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:09 am
by csterg
i would suggest xp as a minimum

Re: Running TW on a 'skinny' virtual machine

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 2:06 pm
by mathetes
You would want XP with at least 2GB of RAM allocated for the vm, along with probably a 75 or 100GB expandable virtual hard drive. If you have a dual monitor setup you could actually run the vm in seamless mode on the second display and have it seem like you have one operating system on one display and the other OS on the other display.

TheWord should run a bit faster in the VM than using WINE if you are running Linux, but for a program like theWord it's not really that much of a practical difference. But using a VM will take more of the computer's resources. So there is a trade-off. I run Debian with KDE as the UI.

Re: Running TW on a 'skinny' virtual machine

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 6:19 pm
by therapon
Kubuntu 14.10, VirtualBox with WinXP and 1GB RAM assigned, Dell Precision M4800 laptop. The size of the virtual machine depends on how you intend to use TW. I primarily use TW on Wine on Kubuntu and access it from VirtualBox through a shared folder. A 3GB virtual machine is about the minimum for XP. From there you'd need to size up based on the size of your TW resources if you install TW on the guest. If (like mine) TW is installed on the host, a minimally sized virtual machine is fine. Performance is similar (virtual machine vs Wine).

About the only issue I've had that is Wine related has to do with popup windows. When a popup is active and you Shift-MouseOver, it gets confused what to do with subsequent popups. (See viewtopic.php?f=11&t=721, 5th entry down).

therapon

Re: Running TW on a 'skinny' virtual machine

Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 7:13 pm
by petrosd
mathetes wrote:You would want XP with at least 2GB of RAM allocated for the vm, along with probably a 75 or 100GB expandable virtual hard drive.
I think those are larger than necessary sizes. I use VMs with XP and 1G of RAM and they run just fine. As for HD size, less than 10G is easily enough, maybe as little as 3-4G. I'm going to set up a bare minimum XP designed to tun TW only (so not even a browser and cache) and see what is needed. As for storage, depending on modules, maybe even 1G is enough, 2G max.

Re: Running TW on a 'skinny' virtual machine

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2015 3:17 am
by mathetes
RAM size can always be configured dynamically. If the hard drive size is set a little larger than necessary at least there is room if needed for it to expand if it is not set to a static size and all the files are being kept in the vm.