Brought up several times in our forums and elsewhere over the past few days has been VMware's Gallium3D driver that they use for guest 3D acceleration on their proprietary virtualization platform.
Compared to Oracle's VM VirtualBox graphics acceleration support that is quite slow for OpenGL and often unreliable or the limited attempts at OpenGL QEMU acceleration, VMware has a rather nice acceleration architecture built atop Gallium3D. Using Gallium3D at the heart of their graphics driver implementation across platforms shouldn't be surprising though since they bought out Tungsten Graphics in late 2008 and its these Mesa / Gallium3D drivers now developing VMware's graphics stack.
ThoughtPolice was born because I kept needing to use the same VMware images over and over again. A google search later, and I had found no place which provided a variety of VMware images. Thinking others would find these images useful, I made them public. Over the months, more and more VMware images were added, and the range expanded to include FreeBSD, evolving into the current day website.
Less than one year since launch, the website has led to more than 370 terabytes of downloads through BitTorrent alone, without which we would be unable to handle the bandwidth requirements. Recently SourceForge was added as primary source for the web downloads, allowing people who cannot use BitTorrent to still use the website.
The website is aimed both at sys admins like myself who need to get an operating system up and running very quickly, and people who just want to try Linux or FreeBSD out.
"Save time and money: leverage the best free open source software to do more with less.
It just works: get ready-to-use solutions up and running in minutes on bare metal, a virtual machine, or in the cloud.
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Secure and easy to maintain: auto-updated daily with latest security patches.
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100% Open Source: free from expensive and restrictive proprietary licensing. Easy to customize and extend to build new appliances from the closest existing starting point.
Based on Ubuntu 8.04.3: a Long Term Support release.
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P2V stands for Physical to Virtual. In other words, it is the process or procedure of moving a running system (operating system and everything installed) from a physical machine to a virtual machine.