Fedora core suggestions

[Kostas Georgiou]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 07:34:32PM -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On 4/21/06, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One alternative for non-technical users which Jef Spaleta mentioned a
> > little while ago in IRC was testing of high-level functionality and
> > interfaces using VMWare Player and an image provided by Fedora.  This
> > would potentially lower barriers not only to non-technical users but to
> > willing folks who only have a single system available, or have a low
> > risk threshold for some other reason.
> >
> > VMWare has opened its VMDK (virtual disk) format for use by anyone[1] so
> > there's nothing preventing an intrepid Fedora hacker from designing a
> > converter program.  The community could then make some decisions about
> > one or more "test platform" images that could be converted to VMDK and
> > distributed via the existing BitTorrent tracker.  People using either
> > Windows or Linux could then download the free VMWare Player to run the
> > Fedora VMDK image.
> 
> 
> Someone has to check on the licensing is for the VMDK crap. My IRC
> musing was a whatif.. based on the assumption that the VMDK crap made
> it possible to engineer a player image with a yet-to-be-created open
> tool.  Its possible right now to have player images, we saw the
> community create them in the fc5 testing phase. But i strongly feel
> the Fedora project shouldn't be offering official vmware player images
> until its possible to create those images with an open tool. I'm
> desperately hopeful that the VMDK licensing change is enough to make
> such an open tool possible.

qemu can use VMDK images so the tool is already available in extras.
Most likely you'll only need minor (if any) configuration changes
before you can use the image with vmplayer.

Kostas Georgiou