First we downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. This download is free and is found on the Microsoft Website. Virtual PC 2007 requires a 400 MHz Pentium-compatible processor (1.0 GHz or faster recommended), and requires approximately 35 MB of disk space. It runs on Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Next our instructor wanted us to download a version of Linux and experiment to see if we could virtualize it and perform file sharing. I started to download Ubantu but abandoned it because it was taking too long. Another student found a version of Linux called DSL that only required 50Mb to download.
Everyone decided to use this one instead for time's sake. The download went fine, in no time we had Linux up and running in a virtual environment on our machines. We now had Vista and Linux on the same machine. It was a little tricky to find out how to navigate between the two windows. You would have to use the control button to locate the mouse from one window to the other.
After setting up Linux, we tried to ping other computers on our network. The set up was different from Windows but after a few tries we were able to ping back and forth.
The we tried file sharing. This proved to be more of a challenge than anticipated. Unfortunately we ran out of time before we were successful at it.
This was an interesting lab and one that I will continue to experiment with on my own time. Although we did not success in file sharing, it was still an informative lab.
