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In case you don't have a Linux server (How Dare You) there is now a windows based asterisk:

http://www.asteriskwin32.com/

Or you could of course run asterisk in a virtual machine. using something like virtualbox: http://www.virtualbox.org/

Loading Mac OS X into a VM is always a challenge.

I'll be trying that myself RSN, after I upgrade to Snow Leopard and install Ubuntu. Apple allows it but only OS X Server and only on Apple branded hardware. Up above some people have posted links to OS X being virtualized, as have I. Here's Mac OS X Tiger on VMware Server. And my link on an Mac OS X guest.

Falcon

I am waiting for the ability to run it ala VirtualBox or Vmware Player/Workstation.

That's what I want to do, run Snow Leopard, SN in a VM. I want to setup my Mac I'm typing this on to dual boot SN and Ubuntu. Then I'll use VirtualBox or another VM program to run Ubuntu in a VM. I'd also like to run SN in a VM in Ubuntu, that way I could boot into either OS and still run the other one. In the VirtualBox forums I read it was possible to run OS X as a guess but when I last searched I didn't find out how to.

I don't have any use for my Mac mini other than checking some web design comparability with Safari under OSX

I'll be using my Mac for development. With my Mac I can program and test them in Linux, OS X, and Windows.

I don't like having yet another piece of hardware I don't even need sitting around.

I know what you mean. I have a WinME PC with hardware problems I'm thinking of putting into storage for now and I have two other PCs, one dualboot with NT4.0 and Redhat and the other's a Linux PC. That is I bought it new with Linux preinstalled. Both are under my desk now. The NT4 box being more than 10 years old, and having a DEC Alpha CPU, I'm not sure what to do. That is other than gut the case and rebuild. Now I plan on doing that with the Linux PC, it was a low powered PC anyway, I paid $250 for it versus more than $5000 for the NT4 box. I have other PCs renters in my apartment building left behind as well. For those I was thinking of listing them, and maybe my old ones, on Freecycle for anyone willing to come and pick them up.

Maybe you can do the same, list your hardware on Freecycle.

Falcon

I would start by installing VirtualBox.
 
  (There's a repository that you can set up for the full-featured proprietary version. The free version is in the Ubuntu repositories.) Then, you need a Windows license. The install is pretty straightforward.

Sorry, if you want to use Windows apps on Linux or the Mac, emulation is the way to go. It's not free, but it works perfectly.

Check out VirtualBox. It's free to download and use, and available for Linux and Mac OS X.

Sure.

More seriously, this nicely highlights the silliness and growing ambiguity in saying you "run Linux". It's like an Apple user saying "I run XNU"

While I have a MBP 13.3 for dev work, it currently lacks:

1. Docking port + station
2. User-swappable battery. However, the 7 hours of battery life it brings is pretty decent, even while working with WiFi. You can, of course, just grab an external battery power pack from a vendor off the web.

I wanted a dock for my MBP too and thought about getting a BookEndz dock. Maybe it meets your requirements. Now I don't like the non user swappable batteries. An external battery pack may mitigate that though.

Still, it's a good buy. I'd forget bootcamp and just virtualize the other OS with vmWare Fusion.

Though I won't use Bootcamp I will dualboot Snow Leopard and Ubuntu. I'm still using Leopard now but when I install Snow Leopard I'll also install rEFIt to use as the boot selector. I'll also install and use VirtualBox. That way I can boot into Ubuntu and use it at full speed as well as run Ubuntu in a VM in Ubuntu.

Falcon

http://vmware.com/

http://parallels.com/

http://virtualbox.org/

Take your pick, any one of them will run Windows 98 on Mac OS X.

The 13" MacBook Pro fits within your budget ($1199), has hardware virtualisation so can run any Intel-based operating system under VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop or Virtual Box
You don't get a hot-swap Ultrabay, but you probably don't really need the added complexity. It has a built-in 7-hour battery, has a built-in SD Card reader, has a built-in SuperDrive (Dual-layer DVD±RW, CD-RW) It doesn't have an option for a Floppy Drive from Apple, but any USB floppy will work with it (seriously, does anyone use them anymore? Even Windows doesn't need floppies to load drivers from during the initial install).
It doesn't have an option for a docking station from Apple, but it has all the ports on one side of the machine, rather than at the rear, so it's very easy to plug and unplug - I do this daily and don't miss not having a docking station. If you NEED a docking station, there's a 3rd party one from BookEndz

It has outstanding hardware build quality, comes with a fantastic development environment for free, and can run any of the open-source ones as well, can run Windows XP SP2+ natively on the bare metal, but who wants to reboot these days, so it'll run everything back to DOS in virtualisation. It will also open you up to a new user experience and a new operating environment that you may just end up liking. If you don't you format the drive and install Linux or Windows instead...

There exists alternatives VirtualBox from Sun is free, but you need a legit copy of Windows XP Pro (Home Edition won't do due to Microsoft's EULA license for emulators and virtual machines) to run inside of it. Pricewatch.com sells OEM versions of XP Pro for $99 to $139 IIRC from various vendors. But I would recommend the Windows 2000 Pro version for old legacy software as it doesn't have the annoying WGA nag and activation hassles and requires less money and still runs a majority of 32 bit programs, just not programs that need Windows XP SP2 or SP3, if you need that then get Win XP Pro instead and deal with the hassles.

Or if you want to delv into the open source world, check out VirtualBox. It supports the CPU extensions if they are available, but are not required.

I use it for setting up test environments for software development under various Linux and BSD flavours on a Gentoo Linux host. Works great for me.

Have you tried installing a 32 bit OS on a VM, like say, virtualbox to talk to the calculator? I know it's not exactly what you want, but it might do the trick.....

"If Oracle still charges per core, the Niagara approach of many core CPUs could be more expensive."

Just run it in a single core Virtual Machine, e.g. VirtualBox.

The other .5% are like me and still have some 16 bit software they are really old games from the Win 3.1 days I still love (sim tower and others), or old utilities from mid 90s that haven't been replaced simply because I am used to them and they work. For these, virtualPC is the only option to run them.

DosBox does the job just fine.

Of course, it would be more reasonable if you could install VirtualPC on Vista Home Premium, as I have two laptops that run it (bought them used) and there is no technical reason they can't, except MS doesn't want them to.

If you're really wedded to the idea of using a fancy-shmancy emulator, go download Suns VirtualBox. It'll install on your "home premium" without problems, and I find it to be a far superior product. Plus the "free" thing is kinda nice.

But, it will run fine in virtualbox, using the asio4all driver inside the VM. FLStudio will too, for that matter - though the GUI takes a bit more CPU than it normally would.

You still need a copy of windows however :/

As other responders have pointed out, you can try WIndows 7 Ultimate (Release candidate) for free for a year so you can answer all your own questions. The 32-bit version works fine under Sun's free VirtualBox so you don't even need to dedicate a machine to it, just a few GB of disk space.

I downloaded it and installed it on a few machines and used it for a good amount of time, and I'm sure it's stable and fast and whatever, but the UI still makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I hate it for a thousand different reasons. Thank God I don't have to use it at work.

Your adamance makes it tempting to switch back to the OSE, but since VirtualBox themselves and the Ubuntu docs as of July 26th still proclaim it to only be in the closed source version I suspect you're full of shit, and have mistaken the PUEL edition for Open Source. What version did you install to get USB support?

At least running on an OS X 10.5.7 host, 3D is definitely not yet stable - even OpenGL which is not listed as "experimental".

See here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19352

Other than that, VirtualBox is very polished in general. 3D is just not a feature that works yet, and should not be used in a production environment.

The latter. See here, where they say

The VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is the one that has been released under the GPL and comes with complete source code. It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers. This gives us a chance to generate revenue to fund further development of VirtualBox. [emphasis mine]

Unfortunately, looks like they still haven't fixed bug 1040, or even upgraded its priority from 'minor.' The gist of it is, do not even think about touching anything in the GUI relating to the 'snapshot' feature, unless you really, absolutely, positively understand what you're doing. The wording is very confusing, and can easily lead to data loss scenarios. Unfortunately, since this is a human interface flaw, and not a programming error, it seems like it's not really being taken seriously. In my mind, sadly, this is exactly the sort of macho hacker mentality that keeps OSS from mainstream acceptance.

The free to use 'personal user end license' does actually allow you to use VirtualBox in a commercial environment, as long as you install it and use it yourself. Check out their FAQ at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ If you can live without USB connectivity then the GPL version is also pretty fully featured, and their 'seemless' mode is really really cool.

people will still run Windows XP Pro in Virtual Machines just to run "legacy software" that does not run on Windows Vista, Windows 7.0, etc.

VirtualBox by Sun just reached version 3.0.0 and supports Windows XP, Vista, and 7.0 as both host and guest operating systems. It can even run DOS virtual machines, but has no addons support for DOS.

For DOS support most people just use DOSBox but it has no printing support. For example Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS runs in it, but since it has no printer support, just select Postscript for a printer and then use Ghostscript or some other Postscript program to drop the Postscript data file on to print it out. After Microsoft went to the Windows NT and up and left the Windows 9X platform, it broke a lot of DOS applications. DOSBox is cool, as it even supports Tandy 1000 standards so that means those DOS video games that selected CGA or Tandy graphics can be played in Tandy mode. That was before EGA and then later VGA was invented.

Retrocomputing is more than just a fad, for some that have "legacy software" issues they have to use older hardware and older operating systems, or run older operating systems in virtual machines and/or emulators.

The cost of upgrading "legacy software" to Windows Vista or even Windows 7.0 standards is too high and too difficult for most software companies, plus Windows Vista broke a lot of software development tools including some old versions of Visual Studio as recent as 2002 or 2003. There is a lot of software that businesses need, that cannot be converted to run on Vista or 7.0, which is why Microsoft has that XP Virtual Machine, but they futzed up the XP Virtual machine and it is not 100% XP compatible. So I am guessing virtual machines like VirtualBox, VMWare, etc will be used to run XP in a virtual machine for better compatibility.

Not a matter to servers, but in Virtualbox, I and many others have not been able to get Desktop Effects(nvidia) or Audio(pulse) working properly, ie at all on Fedora 10 or 11. You could say its a driver problem, which is the standard answer, but Ubuntu 9.04 works upon install. Audio is crystal clear, and Desktop Effects are already enabled.

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewforum.php?f=3

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a a tool that let you run outdated software, including all of its OS dependencies, in a little walled garden, allowing you to run modern software for all other uses?

It'd be even cooler if we could get major OS vendors to provide this functionality as part of the OS

You could let them play inside a virtual machine: http://www.virtualbox.org/ If you cant say no to people using your system having them trapped in a virtual machine may keep you from reloading windows on your box. If you use windows lock down Internet Explorer to unusual with an admin kit and force them to use Google Chrome, preventing some of the common nasties from eating your computer. The real question is why not just be rude, a laptop is a tool that you use for education most students I know don't have unlimited resources to replace laptops that are damaged by people who are borrowing them.

I don't know about other VMs, but FYI Sun's "VirtualBox" (which runs on Windows/Linux/etc - it's not a Solaris-only thing) has recently added accelerated OpenGL support via a driver installed in the VM that basically provides a tunnel through to the real hardware driver on the host OS. They've also added accelerated Direct3D support via code taken from WINE that translates DIRCET3D calls into OpenGL ones.

I highly recommend VirtualBox - much faster and better integrated into the host OS than VMWare, for sure. Very easy to setup and use.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Even when you have a million apps, it's not that hard.

You know times are tough when one gets modded "troll" for speaking the truth.

The ArsTechnica article makes an interesting point: could Microsoft have done an XP mode that works on all CPUs?

PC virtualization has been around for years, and predates the special instructions. There is a hack called Binary Translation (BT) where a VM system patches the memory image of the guest program to cause a trap where the guest program uses any difficult-to-virtualize instruction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_virtualization

The new Windows Virtual PC feature is based on the old Microsoft Virtual PC. Microsoft Virtual PC does not require the virtualization instructions; it can run using BT. So, the point ArsTechnica asked is: why did Microsoft require the virtualization instructions?

I'll try to answer that question. But first, I'm going to rant.

Microsoft has made this much weirder and more confusing than necessary. The new feature is "Windows Virtual PC" and the old, rather different feature, is "Microsoft Virtual PC". In three years, will we have some new third thing that is completely different and is called "Microsoft Windows Virtual PC"? I'll use some abbreviations: I'll call the shiny new Windows 7 virtualization solution, Windows Virtual PC, "W7V" (Windows 7 Virtualization). I'll call the old Microsoft Virtual PC "VPC" (Virtual PC). My first draft of this article was full of "Microsoft Virtual PC" and "Windows Virtual PC" and it was hard to keep track of which was which. Also, Microsoft has broken their web site: links that used to go to VPC are now redirected to W7V. If you are trying to get information on VPC, ha ha! You lose. I was able to find the download page for VPC 2007, but all the links for information now redirect to the W7V page. <end_rant>

So, why did Microsoft require virtualization instructions for W7V? I'm just guessing here, but I think it's pretty obvious.

Take a look at the comparision page for Windows Virtual PC:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/features/compare.aspx

W7V adds some new features over the old VPC. Smart cards work, USB devices work, storage drives can be shared. This means that Microsoft did a nontrivial amount of work for W7V. I'll guarantee you that it was easier to just require the virtualization instructions than to try to use BT hacks across the whole Windows XP infrastructure; and this requirement slices away a whole bunch of old computers that now don't need to be tested for compatibility with the new W7V features.

So, the work to create W7V was easier, and testing and support costs reduced, by this decision. Since only the very cheapest new CPUs don't have the virtualization instructions, and this feature was chiefly aimed at corporate customers (who usually don't buy bargain-bin hardware), this decision was likely viewed as a no-brainer.

VPC is still available; customers who have old hardware and don't need the full features of W7V can just use VPC. And VPC remains a free download. (Of course, those customers could also switch to Ubuntu and run their old apps in VirtualBox. I'm just sayin'.)

steveha

Several Vista users I know hate it so much they asked me to install VirtualBox running XP - after they saw it running on my wife's Mac. (She only uses it because some sites use browser plugins not available for OS X - another effect of the monopoly).

I hope you are either offering to install linux for them, or telling them to buy a license for XP, unless you wanted to sound like a hypocrite.

Several Vista users I know hate it so much they asked me to install VirtualBox running XP - after they saw it running on my wife's Mac. (She only uses it because some sites use browser plugins not available for OS X - another effect of the monopoly).

Indeed, virtualization need not be in a window.. here's a nice screenshot of Sun's VirtualBox running XP in "seamless mode" on OSX Leopard.

I realise that's not quite what you're referring to, I just think that feature looks cool.

man, VirtualBox gets more and more attractive by the day.

While Sun may not be the strongest FOSS advocate, they've made many adjustments over the past few years to open up several products.

Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster

Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

Time warpin’ with Sun xVM VirtualBox
Set the 'bios' time of the virtual box.

VBoxManage modifyvm <name> -biossystemtimeoffset <ms>

Actually, thanks for having me look that up, because I was wondering myself.

VirtualBox would be better for unsupported OS. I wouldn't risk plugging Windows apps/services into any internet connected LAN. Even though they run under Wine.

VirtualBox is cross platform and open source (used to be Sun xVM Product).
It's really nice. The (Qt-based) UI could use a bit of work, but I've found it to be much, much faster and more stable than VMware Workstation(v4-v6). My use was WinXP Pro on Gentoo mostly for Photoshop CS2... but it's now running flawlessly under WINE so it doesn't get used much anymore. Still use AnyDVD HD every so often but it's becoming less and less frequent.

Hmmm. I'd have to research a little to answer that accurately. But, I DO KNOW that VMWare Fusion will enable you to run Ubuntu as a guest on the Mac host. (Being a law abiding citizen, I wouldn't DREAM of pointing out that VMWare Fusion can be found on bit-torrent) http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads That page has a download for INTEL MAC - it appears that PPC MAC might be out of luck. I can't offer advice on how to use a Mac, as I've never owned one, but at first sight, it seems that keeping your Mac as the host OS might be wiser. Good luck!

You don't need a lot of cores for VM hosts. But you do need lots of RAM, since each VM can take a huge chunk.

So, essentially, you don't need anything "special" hardware wise to use VM's. And I recommend using Linux + VirtualBox. http://www.virtualbox.org/

Download VirtualBox

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Install a version of Windows XP. If you don't have one find a torrent... cough cough blackxp cough.

Watch March Madness on Windows on Linux.

For the record, I don't watch sports, so I don't know that it work. That said, I have watched Netflix (uses Silverlight) on a licensed Windows in Virtualbox on Ubuntu.

Vista twice trashed an XP system that was dual booting on the same system.

Let that be a lesson to you. Never, ever, under any circumstances should you use a dual boot system, no matter what two Operating Systems are at play. It's the one surefire way to guarantee you will have problems down the road. You went asking for trouble, and it found you.

If for some lame ass reason you need to go back and use XP, use VirtualBox or get a cheap spare hard drive.

http://www.virtualbox.org/register

VirtualBox snapshots are ideal for this purpose. The host can be OS X, Linux, Solaris...

The only thing better than this is not running Windows at all. ;)

This can't help in the case of malware you don't know about - so naturally you would still avoid using any valuable logins or data on Windows (in particular never do your online banking on it). But everyone knows that by now, right?

Go back and read your documentation. There is support for booting of partitions in VirtualBox, but get ready to go to the command line to do a little down and dirty work.

Where is it? I've searched the Virtualbox website for dualboot but it returns nothing. The actual document User Manual (version 2.1.4, updated 2009-02-16)[pdf] is the latest and does not say it can be done. The FAQ doesn't either. Searching the Virtualbox forums returns 56 results but none of them tell how to setup a dualboot Mac so that an installed OS can be run in a VM.

Falcon

Go back and read your documentation. There is support for booting of partitions in VirtualBox, but get ready to go to the command line to do a little down and dirty work.

Where is it? I've searched the Virtualbox website for dualboot but it returns nothing. The actual document User Manual (version 2.1.4, updated 2009-02-16)[pdf] is the latest and does not say it can be done. The FAQ doesn't either. Searching the Virtualbox forums returns 56 results but none of them tell how to setup a dualboot Mac so that an installed OS can be run in a VM.

Falcon

Go back and read your documentation. There is support for booting of partitions in VirtualBox, but get ready to go to the command line to do a little down and dirty work.

Where is it? I've searched the Virtualbox website for dualboot but it returns nothing. The actual document User Manual (version 2.1.4, updated 2009-02-16)[pdf] is the latest and does not say it can be done. The FAQ doesn't either. Searching the Virtualbox forums returns 56 results but none of them tell how to setup a dualboot Mac so that an installed OS can be run in a VM.

Falcon

When our business doubled in size we switched to VirtualBox from Parallels 3. Not only is it quicker but it is more stable and its support of different network interfaces and USB devises is clearly superior. We run Eclipse, Apache and all sorts of other development tools on it to do special Windows only development. We also use it as a main support tool. Also don't overlook the fact that you can have multiple 32bit VMs running at the same time - something that Parallels can't do.

However as I said in the post you replied to Virtualbox does not do something that is important to me, the ability to run a second OS in a VM in one OS that is setup to dualboot. As I said I may install Ubuntu as a second OS to dualboot my Mac. If I do I will want to run Ubuntu in a VM while Leopard is running, as well as the reverse, run Leopard in a VM when Ubuntu is booted up. According to the Virtualbox forums Virtualbox can not do that. Let me rephrase that, none of the threads I read said it could be done and how to. Some said it was impossible and others suggested it might be possible but did not say how. And I found the forums by Googling virtualbox bootcamp. Trying virtualbox dualboot leopard doesn't return what I'm looking for either. I did find this which says how to do it using an external drive. However my Mac is a MacBook Pro and I may not be able to take and use an external drive everywhere I can take the laptop. As it is I replaced the hdd the MBP came with with a bigger drive, the 160GB drive it came with I replaced with a 320GB drive. Using Bootcamp and Disk Utility I'll partition it into 3 partitions, 2 partitions about 50GB each for each OS and the rest for user files.

MacTech dropped a clanger by not including VirtualBox!

I'll second that!

Falcon

When I setup my Mac to dualboot as I'm leaning towards it I may use VirtualBox myself. It would have been nice if Mactech had included it.

Falcon

Best info I can find googling around says that VirtualBox doesn't support 3D acceleration, and adding it would be difficult. http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=16 is the first hit (and from the VB site).

If you've never tried it, please do so. It's free and easy to setup. Supports all major platforms.

I find it is quite fast. Supports also VT-x/AMD-V, and propagates 3D support from host to guest as OpenGL.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Ron

I would have liked to see Sun's VirtualBoxthrown into the mix. I use Fusion and "love" it (as much as one can love having to use Windows), but a free alternative would be nice.

That being said, I also use Crossover (WINE) for quite a few things (IE6, RegexBuddy) so I don't have to launch a full VM image.

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