[XCSSA] vmware, and that "other" OS

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

So temporarily I swapped an AGP card for a PCI graphics card, and my
NIC got cloned and the #1 instance became unviewable/unmodifiable and
the #2 instance couldn't receive any traffic.  Only solution was a
full reinstall.  So, I'm wondering;

1) How can I avoid having to reinstall that other OS over and over
again?  I would like to ghost the drive image periodically but the
drive is pretty big and ghost does bit-for-bit copies... plus maybe
something is broken requiring a reinstall but I don't know it yet when
I blast over the ghost image with a new checkpoint.  I know, I know,
backups are important...

2) If it involves VMWare on a sturdier base (Linux), what distros does
VMWare work with (in practice, I think the only officially supported
distro is RHEL)?

3) If it involves VMWare, can guests access hardware that the host
doesn't have drivers for?

4) How good is stuff like game support (DirectX) under VMWare?
-- 
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