[Radiance-general] Radiance and Photosynthesis

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 1 Jul 2008, at 14:19, David Smith wrote:

> Also, I use Linux on a VirtualPC (Microsoft freeware) in Windows
> (Intel). It's sort of like VMWare where a computer is virtualized and
> simulated in a "sandbox". It's a clumsy and resource hogging amalgam,
> but does let you play around with some of the more fun features of the
> *nix versions without a whole lot of hardware and setup hassle. cat
> /proc/cpuinfo gives the specs of the main processor, so I wonder what
> happens when you run it on a VirtualPC/AMD combination...

Hi David.

Virtual PC by Microsoft is as far as I know a pure software
simulation of a PC that predates the hardware support that's
built into new Intel/AMD chips. It's clumsy and resource hogging
because it simulates an entire PC instead of sharing the hardware
between two operating systems as VMware or Parallels on Mac
does.

If you're looking for a faster and free alternative you can
google for Xen (which has the Linux setup hassle mentioned
above) or VirtualBox (Sun freeware).

On the subject of CPU type it should not matter much which
CPU you are running on. You will get the better performance
out of the CPU that's supported better by your virtualisation
software. In the case of Virtual PC I'd guess it makes no
difference at all.

Regards,
Thomas