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If you're testing/playing around with Linux in a Microsoft-centric shop, there's a good chance that you'll be using Microsoft Virtual PC to run it in a virtual machine on your workstation. Here are a few tips for you, if that's the situation you find yourself in.

• Read Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 824513 for pointers. By the way, they mention that you should use a fixed-sized virtual disk, but I personally didn't notice much difference at all between fixed and dynamic.
• Disable virus scanning on the directory that you're running your virtual machines in. Also, don't install a virtual machine to a network drive if you can help it (for speed purposes).
• During the install, choose the "Run Virtual PC at maximum speed" Performance option (in the global Virtual PC Options).
• If you have a really fast machine (especially a dual-processor machine) somewhere that you can use to do the initial install, do it there and then just move the image over to your workstation after the install process is done (the installed image will probably be over 1 Gig in size, so you'll have to have a network connection to the fast machine, or access to a DVD-burner). The added advantage to this is that you'll have a copy of the freshly installed OS, in case you want to start from scratch or load it on another machine.
• Installation is usually horribly slow, but it's a little faster to do the install from an ISO image rather than a CD (you have the option to use either the physical CD drive or an ISO image as the virtual CD in the VM window). If you only have the install available on CD, you can quickly and easily make your own ISO images using software like ISO Recorder Power Toy.
• Virtual machines running under Virtual PC will NOT see the same base hardware that's on your computer. Instead, they will see an emulation of an S3 Trio video card, a Sound Blaster 16 ISA PnP sound card, and an Intel/DEC 21140 network card. Choose your settings accordingly.

TROUBLESHOOTING
1. If your X-Windows display is completely hosed (especially right after the initial operating system install), it's probably because your display is set to use 24-bit color. For some odd reason, this is unsupported in Virtual PC. As a workaround:

• in your Linux virtual machine, press Control-Alt-F1 to switch to a terminal session
• log in as root
• run your X-Windows configuration program (usually xf86config or redhat-config-xfree86, depending on your distribution), reset your color depth to 16-bit, and reboot (shutdown -r now)
• if you can't seem to find or run your X-Windows config program, you can always edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config file manually (using pico or emacs or whatever), and change the "DefaultDepth" setting in the "Screen" section to 16, and also change the "Depth" setting in the "Display" subsection to 16. And then reboot.

2. If you can't get sound to work, try the tips at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/18/2004/02/4/149181. You may have to log out and log back in (or at least restart your aRTs server) for the change to take effect.

If the "sndconfig" program doesn't exist, doesn't work, or if it crashes when you try to run it, you can always try editing your /etc/modules.conf file directly (you'll normally have to be root to do that). Here are the lines that sndconfig will add:

alias sound-slot-0 sb 
post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || : 
pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || : 
options sound dmabuf=1 
alias synth0 opl3 
options opl3 io=0x388 
options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330 

That may or may not work for you. Again, you'll have to either log out or restart your aRTs server to notice a change.

3. If you want to map a drive to your local Windows workstation, you can do the following:

• make sure you have Samba installed
• open a terminal window and use the "su" command to become root
• create a directory for your mapped drive in the /mnt folder. For example:
  

  mkdir /mnt/winz
  

• enter the following command, substituting your username, password, and the IP address of the share you're trying to access:
  

  mount -t smbfs -o username=domain/username,password=pwd //10.0.0.0/C$ /mnt/winz
  

• if that was successful, you should be able to access the mapped drive by opening your file system browser of choice and navigating to /mnt/winz (or whatever you decided to call the share). If not, you should have received an error describing what went wrong