BibleWorks and VMware

[Ewan MacLeod]

I have been using the free VMware Server a lot recently on my Windows XP laptop. I created a Windows 98 virtual machine using an old Windows 98 CD, then installed BW6 inside the virtual machine. So I now have a fully working BW6 virtual machine which will run on any x86 architecture, independently of Windows. I am running this VM on XP, but it could just as easily be running on Linux.

There are several practical uses of this:

• After creating the VM, you no longer need Windows. You could run it on Linux just as easily.
• If you are using a desktop/laptop where you do not have Administrator access or are not allowed to run your own software, you could put the BW virtual machine on a memory stick, and run it from there, with no software installed on the desktop other than VMware Player.
• It allows you to easily compare versions of BW without installing lots of versions on the hard disk.
• Hopefully ReactOS will become good enough to run BW some day, in which case you could use it as the guest OS instead of Windows.

I'll try to create a BW7 virtual machine next.

By the way, my Windows 98+BW6 virtual machine uses only 64MB RAM, and it runs extremely fast, thank you. Back in '98, 64MB RAM was considered a lot.

- Ewan

[united_by_truth]

Yes, these are great tools. You might have fun looking around here. If VirtualBox runs in Windows it has some advantages.