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Operating Systems Software

Review Of Serenity Virtual Station 166

JigSaw writes "Here's some serious competition for VMWare and Virtual PC: OSNews reviews a new OS emulator, the Serenity Virtual Station, which can run as a host on FreeBSD, Linux and OS/2 and supports as guests a slew of OSes. It is based on the twoOStwo virtual operating engine (which additonally runs on top of Windows as well)."
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Review Of Serenity Virtual Station

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  • Serious? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theM_xl ( 760570 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:46PM (#8892340)
    I don't mean to offend but I'm not going to consider it serious competition until it's managed a few months/years of actual use, as opposed to being merely a beta product that isn't even out for the public yet.
    • I won't consider it serious competition for Bochs and VirtualPC until it can run on one architecture, emulate a different architecture and run an OS for the emulated architecture. Those two are by no means X86-only products like Plex86, VMWare and this new one.
      • Re:Serious? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )
        I won't consider it serious competition for Bochs and VirtualPC until it can run on one architecture, emulate a different architecture and run an OS for the emulated architecture.

        It is not really meant to compete with Bochs and VirtualPC. It is meant to ease the migration of 10 Million OS/2 machines to something else, this week I think its Linux. IBM really wants businesses to get of OS/2 and doesn't want to spend much to support it.
        IBMs future plans for OS/2 involve mostly supporting it on a virtual mach
    • --I agree, this article seems a bit premature since there's nothing to DL on the Serenity website yet. Their logo looks pretty cool tho. Eventually it will be nice for VMware to have some competition.
    • My first thoughts were "Ok, wheres the download link. Oh theres no download link. So how am I supposed to tell whether or not this is a heap of shit?"

      Take someones word I guess...

      NOT.

      (Software is presumed to be shit until proved otherwise, preferably by actual useage).
  • Surprizing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TypoNAM ( 695420 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:48PM (#8892348)
    It's pretty surprizing since doesn't VMware hold several patents on running virtual guest operating systems like Uniden holds a crap load of patents on how to listen on different frequencies? I know bad example, but I couldn't think of anything else at the moment. ;)
  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:48PM (#8892350)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by KrispyKringle ( 672903 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:57PM (#8892407)
      VMWare is the most popular commercial one (for Linux and Windows; VirtualPC would be the one to try on Apple--unless you just want to emulate PPC on PPC, i.e. run OSX on PPC Linux, in which case Mac On L inux is for you). Bochs is the leading open source contendor, in that it emulates a complete x86 machine, and works on any architecture (SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, etc). However, because of that, it's quite slow, and is far more useful for things like reverse engineering or OS testing than actual desktop use (i.e., if you wan't to see registers in use, it'd be great; if you want to watch a movie or use Photoshop, don't bother). And of course, there's always WINE, which runs a number of Windows programs on Linux quite well.
      • You forgot Qemu. It is fast, open source and doing really well. As a bonus as well as dealing with an entire virtual machine, it can also do individual Linux processes (on a Linux host). That way a PPC Linux user can run i386 Linux binaries (including Wine).
        • Strange, I did forget it. I mentioned in in my post just prior, though.

          Have you had a lotta luck with it? I was able to run Linux on Linux (but I may as well use UML then), and it was quite fast, but I didn't have Win98 handy to try, which as I heard it was the only Windows to work on Qemu (and even then, quite unreliably). Know anything about that?

          • I have only tried it with a Windows host. It opened a window and then immediately closed. Due to that I could never figure out what the issue is. At some point I will get around to trying it on Linux.
          • Back when I had my G4 cube, qemu ran wine just fine. I was shocked to have Windows programs running on my PPC box. I didn't do anything special either, just downloaded and ran whatever they had available at the time.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      It's more than just photoshop, i set my friend up with a sun ultra 5 with solaris 9/gnome installed till we got the parts he needed for building his new windows system. He called me more than when his peecee was on the fritz, even though some simple trial and error would of solved most of his problems. I think windows users as a whole are predisposed towards mindless computer use, and have a hard time adapting to new situations. I think thats why a lot of folks still dual boot, when linux/unix does somethin
    • by Joe Tie. ( 567096 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:18PM (#8892519)
      You might try crossover too. I havn't tried it myself, but there's been some good reviews of its support for photoshop in linux [desktoplinux.com].
    • I don't know what other OS emulators had been available, but if Serenity Virtual Station does what it says it does, now I can delete my Windows partition completely!

      You could have done that ages ago.. with VMWare. Serenity isn't any more special than VMWare. From what I can make out, you'll have to pay for it as well!
    • Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bonch ( 38532 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:41PM (#8892638)
      People stay on Windows because:

      - It's easy to use (before someone chimes in with their anecdotal "this happened to me once" situation, yes, for the majority of people Windows is very easy to use)
      - Easy to download and install drivers.
      - As a result, easy to go down to Wal-mart and buy a new printer and have it work in less than a minute.
      - Endless software, including lots of freeware. There's more software for Windows because Windows is easier to develop for, with no endless list of competing, inconsistent toolkits that exist simply to reinvent the wheel yet again and introduce another "choice"
      - Old software still works. I can run my Windows 3.1 programs in XP if I wanted to. Linux distros are still a bit of a moving target. I can't guarantee an RPM I got five years ago will still work, can I? Meanwhile, I can run a Windows app from 10 years ago with no problems.

      If you honestly think the reason that 95% of the marketshare is using Windows is simply because of Photoshop, you're deluded. OS X has Photoshop as well, but look at its share compared to Windows.

      Note that despite all this, Linux can catch up and defeat Windows. But it has to abandon XFree86, implement things like binary installation/uninstallation APIs, one sane toolkit that is a joy to program for (i.e., like .NET or Cocoa), and so forth. Personally, I'm looking forward to the 1.0 release of Y-Windows [y-windows.org].
      • - Endless software, including lots of freeware. There's more software for Windows because Windows is easier to develop for, with no endless list of competing, inconsistent toolkits that exist simply to reinvent the wheel yet again and introduce another "choice"

        good one.
      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > People stay on Windows because:
        >
        > - Easy to download and install drivers.

        When they work, they work great. The problem is, there often don't work that well. Linux doesn't have drivers for everything, but for the drivers that they do have are rock solid and more generic. USB drivers is a prime example. Windows XP requires drivers for some stuff that Linux works with out of the box. Why doesn't the newest version of Windows treat something as generic as USB more generically?

        > - As a result, eas
        • Most of my Windows 98 games don't work and forget about DOS. More than a few of my Windows 2000 apps don't work on Windows XP.

          I call BS until you give an actual list of programs, especially "2000 apps dont work on XP".
      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Oh no, not another one of those "abandon XFree86" posts. God forbid we'd actually consider the truth, that XFree86:

        A) Puts out well-tested, QAed releases
        B) As such, is very reliable (not had an X crash for years)
        C) Is compact and secure
        D) Still runs on 486 boxes comfortably (go try it; I've done it. It's GNOME and KDE slowing things down)

        Evidently, you don't know much about XFree86 -- fair enough, but try not to look ignorant. If you keep pushing for Y-Windows or Fresco or whatever's the fad du jour, you'
      • - It's easy to use

        More significantly, easy to market. Because of what I will herein refer to as STOUshare. People stay with M-Windows because most people are STOUs (Simply Task-Orientated Users) not STEVEs (Serious Techies, Engineers Vilipending Enslavement).

        STEVEs want an open road, the Mustang GT390 of hardware and the Jacqueline Bisset of algorithms... and, er, hardware.

        STOUs want to "send a picture" and "read mail".

        - Endless software, including lots of freeware.

        A STOU doesn't really buy much

      • you ever wondered by certain things are easier in windows? maybe that is because so many hardware manufacturers develop for windows and nothing else. try getting said printer working in BeOS which is even easier to use that windows/macos/linux. if the drivers do not exist, hardware will not work as well.

        so i would say a unified driver interface would be something that OSes need to have so that compiling the drivers for a particular OS is as simple as compiling the driver from within said OS and distributin
      • you don't know what you're talking about...
        easier to use? Oh well... if you follow the wizard click throughs custom built by your peecee vendors yes... it's easier... alas! Try to sidestep the railroad and you're alone... in a rattlesnake den called "The Registry"...
        easier programming? Hmph... you must refer to excel math functions like: average, sum, vector product... oh wait. The walmart printer example? Oh, you must have read ESR's rant... nice try... troll. Endless software? Hmph... how much of it is us
      • no endless list of competing, inconsistent toolkits
        What are: "the XP common controls," "Office toolkit," and ".NET toolkit" then? Even Microsoft can't pick a single toolkit for their products... If you're stupid enough to think Windows has only one toolkit, then I'm hesitant to take anything else you say seriously.
      • This is another weird troll, there have been a lot of them lately. They attack Linux, but rather than with logical things, they say somewhat nonsensical things that have little to do with the problems with Linux and often are complete opposites. Then they tack on faint praise for Linux at the end so that it looks like it came from a Linux supporter.

        When you "go to WalMart and buy a new printer" the reason it "works in Windows" is that there was a DISK IN THE BOX WITH THE PRINTER WITH THE DRIVER ON IT!!! Th
    • A big reason for smaller companies to choose Windows is the lack of accounting software for Linux. My wife is a book keeper and I did a search for Linux stuff that she might use, but found only software by a Canadian company. Accounting and payroll software is nation specific, and here in the UK Sage dominate the market for small business, and last time I looked they don't do Linux.

      A problem with Open Source development is that it is drowning in photo-album organisers and mp3 players, but lacks boring bu
      • Photo-album organizers? I didn't know there was an open source photo organizer.

        If you want accounting software for Linux, try: GnuCash [gnucash.org]

        or

        SQL-Ledger [sql-ledger.org]

        Gnucash is similar to Quickbooks and handles multiple currencies. SQL-Ledger runs on a webserver, so you can run it either on the same computer, or from a webbrowser on a different computer.

        Both are open source. There are other projects too, but you ought to do the research yourself.

        • They're both cute, but neither one has usable payroll. In GNUCash, you have to figure out all of the formulas yourself for each employee? That's insane! If they don't do payroll well, they're useless to me. I'm sure that they're lacking in other features, too, but that's one reason why the poster would say that his wife, an accountant, doesn't have any useable OSS.
  • Is it fast?
  • Two Questions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rick and Roll ( 672077 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:52PM (#8892374)
    I like to use virtualized computers for software development and testing. There are two questions I have before I will seriously consider this.

    1. How much does it cost?
    2. What will be the basic terms of the licensing?
    3. VMWare pricing is a little steep. It is a fantastic product. I don't, however, use all of its features. One that provided the basic functionality, which is a fast, easy-to-use virtual machine at a fraction of the cost would be useful.

      Also, I would want to be sure that the licensing is per-user, and you can install it on any number of host computers you like, provided only you use it. I would not want to have to pay for a separate copy to use under Windows or Linux, because sometimes I will be on my Windows box emulating Linux, and sometimes on my Linux box emulating windows. I myself might use them concurrently, but I will be the user.

      Just two thoughts before giving this serious consideration as an alternative to VMWare.

    • VMWare Price Drop (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sunlighter ( 177996 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:05PM (#8892454)

      VMWare just chopped $100 off the price of VMWare Workstation. You can now buy [vmware.com] version 4.5 for $199 (boxed) or $189 (download).

      At the lower price, Im considering buying it myself. (I would buy only one copy for only one host OS.) Maybe theyre feeling the heat from all [sourceforge.net] that [colinux.org] open [sourceforge.net] source [sourceforge.net] competition [cam.ac.uk].

      • Re:VMWare Price Drop (Score:5, Informative)

        by Wudbaer ( 48473 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:25PM (#8892554) Homepage
        More the heat from Microsoft's (ex Connectix) virtual PC which was originally planned to be cheaper than VMWare Workstation while offering similar features (at least on Windows) (which cannot honestly said for the Open Source ones, or noone would buy either VMWare or Virtual PC anymore).

        In any case it's great it has become less expensive as VMWare Workstation really is a great product.
      • by grotgrot ( 451123 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @03:47PM (#8893163)

        Actually I think it is the Microsoft competition [microsoft.com], now retailing at $129. I believe the majority of VMWare workstation sales are on Windows.

        Microsoft will be coming out with Virtual Server soon.

        VMWare did do one smart thing. They donated free licenses to many open source projects (such as Samba). That ensured that those talented developers didn't contribute their time to the open source projects due to having something that works for them.

        • You can't forget that Virtual PC also comes with the MSDN Universal Subscription too. I know of quite a few converts, especially in the .NET development world, that have switched to virtual pc because of the MSDN Subscription.
        • > I believe the majority of VMWare workstation sales are on Windows.

          --Perhaps. I prefer to be in the minority though; my Vmware Workstation 3.x license is for a Linux host. I wouldn't even *consider* running Vmware on a typical Windows install (as a host) - when, not if, the box crashes, it would take the VM environment(s) with it. Linux == stability, for me.
      • Only $199? :-) VMWare used to sell the workstation product for $49 for personal use, didn't they? Now that its actually stable and people would buy it, they've priced it higher than actual hardware.
    • "VMWare pricing is a little steep. It is a fantastic product."

      I have to agree with you there. But it's a complete bugger to install properly. I've tried several times to get anything to install on it properly, and no dice.

      Using the 30-day evaluation of VMWare gives you just enough time to get frustrated with it.
      • I have installed VMware on a number of Linux distros without any issues. It has been a simple matter of untarring the tar.gz archive and running the install script. You will need gcc and the headers for your current kernel. Most distros have a kernel headers or kernel source package. VMware 4.5 now supports 2.6 kernels. Previous version of VMware required 3rd party patches. If you use one of the supported RedHat, SuSE, or Mandrake distros you probably can install the rpm with even less effort.
        • --I have vmware 3.x running on a Debian Linux 2.4 kernel (host.) Client environment boots Knoppix DVD beta fine with a 2.4 kernel, but crashes with a kernel panic on 2.6 kernels.

          Note: Host == 2.4 kernel, VM client == 2.6 for testing (crashing.) Is there any 3rd-party fix for v3, or do I need v4 to test 2.6 kernels in the VM environment? (For various reasons I'm unwilling to migrate the host itself to 2.6.) TIA

  • Denial of OS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:52PM (#8892377) Homepage Journal
    Can't we strip down the "OS" to just this kind of layer that centralizes access to the unique local hardware and process space? Then the "hosted" OS'es can just be commonly installed apps and libraries. We can carve them up to reduce redundancy. Signed APIs for IPC ACLs would complete this picture. It would remove many of the limits to scaling a processor off a single machine, to any available network resources. And the open source OS'es would be more fit to reproduce in this environment.

    "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"
    - WB Yeats, "Things Fall Apart"
    • Re:MVS (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes. And it shall be called MVS.
    • Re:Denial of OS (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:21PM (#8892534) Journal
      Yes, we can. It's called a microkernel. The most popular one is Mach, which typically runs a version of BSD as a userspace process in which programs are run.
      • Actually, I think this suggestion is more akin to an exokernel [wikipedia.org].
      • Re:Denial of OS (Score:5, Interesting)

        by naasking ( 94116 ) <naaskingNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday April 17, 2004 @05:40PM (#8893856) Homepage
        Yes, we can. It's called a microkernel.

        True.

        The most popular one is Mach

        Barf. Not to sound rude, but Mach is a horrid base for an operating system. I'm sorry Apple went with it.

        If you mean popular as in "most widely used", then yes, Mach is the most popular "microkernel" (though it doesn't really fit the definition).

        Mach is far from the most popular in hacker or academic circles (ie. those who know any better). L4 [l4ka.org] and EROS [eros-os.org] are far more suitable hosts for a guest operating system. L4 already has Linux 2.2 and 2.4 running as hosts [tu-dresden.de] in fact.
    • In other words, have X-Windows on top of an NT kernel and Windows GUI on top of a Linux kernel. There's no technical reason why not. NT is (in theory) even designed to support this, with it's "Posix-compliant" APIs.

      But vendors don't sell kernels and libraries. They sell complete systems. Getting all the pieces to interoperate would be like insisting that all the car companies sell cars that use each others parts. In both OSs and cars, it's technical feasible, it would very nice for users, it would lower t

  • by KrispyKringle ( 672903 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:54PM (#8892387)
    That's odd. Admittedly, it's not unheard of (UML requires a kernel module, but then it's not a hardware emulator, either). But you'd think if it runs with host OSes of FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, and OS/2, it wouldn't rely on anything needing a kernel module; I have no idea how one gains that functionality in Windows or OS/2 (though perhaps this is easier than I am guessing). And I can't help but wonder, then, whether it does hardware emulation in the vein of Bochs, or system call translations in the vein of Qemu. I suppose it's a fair guess that it's the latter, though, since it appears to be x86 only (no mention of support for OSX, which should be easy enough if FreeBSD is supported).

    Ah, well. Trust OS News to be short on technical details. Or even on proper grammar.

    • by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:36PM (#8892614) Homepage Journal
      As far as adding the required functionality to OS/2, Serenity can do that directly, as they are the current developers and distributors of the current implementation of OS/2, aka E-CommStation.

      I think the support would be added to Windows via a .vxd driver, running in ring 0 on the processor.

      The author indicates that the Beta responsiveness is comparable to VMWare, which suggests that it is using some form of providing access to the hardware, rather than emulating hardware in software.

      As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.

      Then again, I'm not currently developing emulators for any platform, so what do I know.

      -Rusty
      • As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.

        Yeah, but x86-32 processors themselves have built-in virtual 8086 processor hardware support. A virtual x86-32 processor is much trickier to implement on an x86-32 machine, since the x86-32 doesn't supply hardware support for that.

        OS/2 isn't the only OS that supports virtual 8086s, either -- Linux/DOSEmu and Windows back to 3.0 (in 386 Enhanced

        • OS/2 isn't the only OS that supports virtual 8086s, either -- Linux/DOSEmu and Windows back to 3.0 (in 386 Enhanced Mode) do, too. Though on Windows you're limited to what OS/2 called Virtual DOS Machines, while Linux supports Virtual Machine Boots.


          Actually OS/2s virtual machine support is good enough to boot any version of DOS and anything else that will run on a 8086. Minix runs fine here on OS/2.
  • Free? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tyler_larson ( 558763 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:56PM (#8892397) Homepage
    I didn't see anything on their site about licensing cost, but it doesn't look like it's free.

    Does anyone know about a free alternative to VMWare etc.? It sure would be nice to be able to run "the other OS" in a virtual machine while I'm on Linux or Windows... but not nice enought to warrant paying for it.

    • Re:Free? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jlp2097 ( 223651 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:13PM (#8892487) Homepage Journal
      Yes, there is Bochs [sf.net], which is able to run Windows 2000 [sourceforge.net], Windows 95 and a lot of Unices. It is an x86 emulator and according to their own FAQ [sourceforge.net] pretty slow. But if you just want to run some programs from time to time - there you go.
      HTH
      • I hate to reply to my own post - but I forgot to mention that Bochs is also available for Windows [sourceforge.net].
      • Re:Free? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Spy Hunter ( 317220 )
        There is an up-and-coming x86 (and PowerPC and ARM) emulator named QEMU [bellard.free.fr] that is over 60 times faster than Bochs (resulting in being ~4x slower than native code). It'll be a while before running Windows on QEMU is reliable, but it can be installed and booted on the virtual machine right now.
      • Bochs is not a VM it is a CSIM (complete software interpeter machine) and is EXTREMELY slow
      • Bochs is slower than glacial tho, so if you want to do something other than OS development, it's more or less useless.
    • "Does anyone know about a free alternative to VMWare etc."

      Well, you can run Windows programs in WINE.

      And WINE runs on linux.

      And linux runs on usermode linux.

      And using usermode linux, you can have as many virtual machines as you like.

      Plus being WINE, it probably won't take as many system resources as Windows itself (no need to load Internet Explorer regardless, etc.)

      Of course, if you want free software, the Free Software people will offer you a Free operating system. There's no particular reason why t
      • WINE isn't an alternative to VMWare.

        Wine can run win32 software on linux.
        VMWare can run windows or linux and other on windows or linux.

        Two completely different aproach to two different problems.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:57PM (#8892404)
    Imagine the possibilities. You can boot Windows XP, start this Serenity thing, boot a Linux image into it, run Bochs, and boot Windows 95 into that. And then you'll be set, my friend, because you know what they say: once the Linux community gets this circular OS booting thing going on, Linux will make definite inroads. Watch out, Redmond.
    • In my old days, I once had an Apple IIci running AUX. Inside that system, I ran the Macintosh app Virtual PC. (At least I think that was it's name, but that was a long time ago . . . a long long time ago ... 1993) Inside of Virtual PC, I installed DOS 6.22. Then, low and behold, I boot up Windows 3.11. At the time, it was the most convoluted way to run Windows, but it worked. Slowly. Very very slowly. But it worked.
  • Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:03PM (#8892448) Homepage
    It's not clear what's going on here. If it's an x86 CPU emulator, this is quite possible, but it will be slow. If most code is executing natively, it's necessary to use the hacks VMware does. (IA-32 machines don't hypervise properly, but they're close. That's why VMware is possible, but a horrible hack. Compare VM for IBM mainframes, where the hardware was done right.) The review says that there are no benchmarks because this is a pre-release version.

    Actually, if you want to run virtual machines, the way to go might be the AMD 64-bit machines, which supposedly have the proper hardware support virtual IA-32 machines. Has anybody tried that yet?

    • Compare VM for IBM mainframes, where the hardware was done right.)

      Great comparison. Like in: "You can stuff lots of people in your Cessna, but it is a horrible hack. Compare a Boing 747, which is an aircraft done right." The right tool for the right job, and VMWare does its job pretty well, ugly hack or not.

  • by ValourX ( 677178 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:11PM (#8892478) Homepage
    insanity later
  • Since buying my 15" PowerBook G4, I've been able to replicate most of the main functions I had on previous Linux or Windows boxes.

    About the only think I haven't got is a good PPC vertual machine application. Yes, there is VirtualPC, but that emulates a completely different architecture (x86), so there will be a big performance hit. What I am looking for is the equivalent of VMWare for PowerPC. I could then have a farily light weight LinuxPPC image for all my Linux needs, rather than needing to repartit
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Mac on Linux. you'd have to run LinuxPPC, then you can run a Mac OS (Or another PPC based OS for that matter) in that. http://www.maconlinux.org/

      I've been meaning to toy with it for some time, maybe now that I have a new iBook I'll try it on my old iMac.
    • Mac-on-Linux [maconlinux.org] is a start. I've used it in the past, and it was quite snappy (on par with VMWare for x86). Unfortunately, it is only hosted under Linux. But for guest operating systems it claims to support Linux, MacOS 9, and MacOS X.

      I've occasionally had the desire to do some sandboxed work on my Mac (I use VMWare for the PC all the time), but I can't bring myself to install Linux on my Powerbook. Removing FreeBSD and installing Linux on my PC (for VMWare) was hard enough.

      But, if you can live with Linu
    • from the Mac-on-Linux site:

      Mar 21, 2004 Mac-on-Linux 0.9.70 is out!

      It is here, finally! Some highlights:

      Support for CD burners
      Generic USB support
      Generic SCSI support
      Sound driver rewrite (and ALSA support)
      Networking improvements
      Reduced latency
      Mac OS X 10.3 acceleration
      Performance enhancements
      Various bug-fixes
      Support for the 2.6 kernel
      Debugger improvements
      Misc improvements for SMP systems
      A lot of other minor modifications

      Technical highlights
      THIS LIN
    • I could then have a farily light weight LinuxPPC image for all my Linux needs,

      Out of curiosity, what needs are those, that Mac OS X can't do as well natively? Some people might need Linux/x86 for proprietary software, but I can't imagine there's much proprietary Linux/PPC software that isn't available for Mac OS X. Is there still a lot of open-source software that doesn't compile properly on OSX?
      • You're right, almost all of the Unix things I want to do I can do under OS X. That was the reason I bought the PowerBook in the first place.

        There are some Linux-specific things I want to poke around with, like the Linux kernel, and various extensions to that.

        But, the main reason is that I want to avoid mucking up my MacOS X environment as much as possible. I hesitate before compiling/installing software that needs extensive libraries. Or, perl apps with a bunch of dependencies, etc. I want to have
  • Unless it offers... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:11PM (#8892482) Journal
    ...spectacularly better performance or a lower price compared to VMware, it's of no value to me. Actually, I'm quite sorry to see the direction plex86 has gone in becuse they could have offered a nice alternative to VMware. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any company who has hit on the idea of an OS specifically GEARED towards virtualization. I think they'd steal the show. VMware on Linux is about the closest you can get to that right now. But the perfect solution would be a thin OS with no GUI that just allows you to install and run multiple OSes simultaneously.
    • The problem with this is hardware support. IBM can get away with it because they control the hardware.

    • by isj ( 453011 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:28PM (#8892570) Homepage
      Actually IBM z/VM is geared toward virtualization. Everything you run on it is running inside its own VM. The instruction set is also virtualized - it is changed on-the-fly to whatever the CPU supports. That is how old programs from the sixties can still run on modern hardware.

      More information at http://www.vm.ibm.com/

      But z/VM will not be the "new virtual machine" for desktops because: (a) the virtual instruction set is s390, (b) all I/O is done through "channels", (c) you need big iron to run it.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      > Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any company who has hit on the idea of an OS specifically GEARED towards virtualization

      Google for "Xen", but it's an academic project.
    • The reason no company offers that OS geared for virtualization is hardware support. Any host OS has to support all the hardware that it runs on, and who has the largest support base? Windows, then Linux. No one else is in the ballpark (except maybe Apple, but that's for Apple hardware only...).

      For comparison, the VMware server offerings DO have their own mini-OS to serve as host. It's a heavily-modified RedHat Linux, which provides a console and basic OS services (like hard disks and network routing),

    • VMWare does that with their ESX Server [vmware.com] product. It uses Linux 2.4 as a booloader for the virtualization layer, but otherwise it seems to run on bare metal.
    • the problem is not the OS it is ia32 architecture
    • "the perfect solution would be a thin OS with no GUI that just allows you to install and run multiple OSes simultaneously."

      What do you think VMware ESX Server is?
    • Speaking as a slightly advanced home user, ESX server wouldn't be of much use since it's pretty expensive and requires very expensive hardware. If we're being completely honest here, most of us do more with omputers at home than work. I run VMWare Workstation so that I can boot Win9x for the occasional app or game that doesn't run in W.I.N.E. People like me need addressing and ESX won't do it. I was kind of excited about Plex86. I've also used Dosbox to some extent (for emulation, not virtualization).
  • by xswl0931 ( 562013 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:15PM (#8892501)
    Minor but significant difference.
  • becareful.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaa@@@SPAM...yahoo...com> on Saturday April 17, 2004 @03:03PM (#8892812) Journal
    the i386 aarchitecture is an inheriently non-virtulaizable architecture. The reason for this is the presence of 17 non privileged sensitive instructions. VMware has to modify binary code before executing i386 binaries natively in a VM. Even in that case, we arent really sure what it is they do since it is closed source.

    I would be very very careful with VMs for i386 unless of course i knew exaclty how it was handling those 17 instructions. Just becasue it can run programs does not mean that it is a proper VM or even that it is a secure VM.
    There is a chance you can mess up your machine with theset things.
  • by bkhl ( 189311 ) <bkhl@elektrubadur.se> on Saturday April 17, 2004 @03:04PM (#8892828)
    Apart from the obvious reference to the village I live in (Svista [ling.uu.se]), is this some Firefly [fireflyfans.net] reference going on right under our noses?
  • OSX (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is there any sort of emulator that can allow people with x86 architecture boxes to run OSX? I'm not sure about the details involved in creating something like that or if it is even possible so edify me.
    • ... I believe this is the closest you can get, not an emulator but a branch off the original OSX project. They have OS that runs on either PPc machines and on x86. There was some schisming a ways back, and I think there's an "offical" apple branch as well, and I do not know which is better or "more pure" or "low on carbs" or whatever the beef is.. or whatever, I just know they exist. this one has the nifty GNU in the front of it.

      Gnu-Darwin [sourceforge.net]
  • by base_chakra ( 230686 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @03:23PM (#8892968)
    One irritating thing about VMWare Workstation is that it's only officially supported with a few very specific kernel versions with standard configurations. In my experience, sometimes it's a problem, sometimes it's not. Serenity reportedly supports all 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.

    On another note, VMware released several versions of their software before they finally included such important features as USB support. Even though it's still unclear whether such features will make it into the first official release of Serenity, one wonders how soon an open source project of this magnitude will be able to match VMware Workstation 4.x's performance and core feature set--especially considering that Serenity's supported OS's already rival VMware's.

    If Serenity is more responsive in windowed mode than VMware Workstation, then that's already a big plus.

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