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From the article:

A member of the international open source community, Aloni developed CoLinux along with several Japanese programmers, collaborating over the Net. According to the Web site, they've written special core drivers for the host OS which modify the way the host OS receives notifications from the hardware - thus allowing both OSes to coexist peacefully - and run at a decent speed as well.

And from the VMWare site.

VMware Workstation works by enabling multiple operating systems and their applications to run concurrently on a single physical machine. These operating systems and applications are isolated in secure virtual machines that co-exist on a single piece of hardware. The VMware virtualization layer maps the physical hardware resources to the virtual machine's resources, so each virtual machine has its own CPU, memory, disks, I/O devices, etc. Virtual machines are the full equivalent of a standard x86 machine.

Well, as the article says, the trick is about virtualization of hardware. How does that differ from VMWare? I don't see how "IDF innovated again".

"New OS Support: SUSE Linux 9.0 listed under 4.5 (not 4.5.1).

You didn't say much about your application, but you might want to look at using vmware instead of a stack of hardware. I've been using it since 1.0 and it has completely quenched my need to buy and maintain a suite of servers for testing my distributed apps.

Heh, some of the links you'll need are:

Vmware

(Tight)vnc

NTLM Auth setup
(Noob) RDP setup for XP

I do realize some of the above aren't anywhere near secure, and also that if this system was on the outside world that I would recommend none of these services be enabled. -Ori

This has been done before. Try:

Wine if you just want a few Windows apps on your PC.
Win4Lin if you really want Windows on your PC.
VMWare if you want XP on your PC.
TightVNC if you want to access a Windows box from another box.
Samba if you want to share your drives back to your Windows box.

Why face the security holes of Windows when you can run Windows Apps in Linux! These two apps neeed more publicty then they have! Wine - Lets you run Windows applications on Linux Run Windows on Linux in a sandbox!. Be a good slashdotter, don't let Windows on the network, use the Penguin!

I tried Linux (Coyote, Red Hat 4, Red Hat 5, Gentoo, Mandrake 7, Red Hat 7, Mandrake 8) but it just never grabbed me. I switched my firewall from Coyote to OpenBSD and liked it so much I now use it for my server, too. I still use Windows on my workstation because I need it for games and it's just easier to stick with it for everyday things than to multi-boot. If I ever get the money I may try VMWare, but it won't be to run Linux on my Windows PCs, it will be to run BSD. I really agree with the statementn "Linux is for people who hate Microsoft; BSD is for people who love UNIX."

Yeah, I know BSD is dead, but I'm a zombie so I don't care :-P

I can vouch for this. I want to start using Linux - I really do - but at the moment I absolutely can't do without many of the applications I use that are Windows-only. I also don't really want to go and re-partition my drive right now. I was actually looking at purchasing VMWare so that I could play around with Linux without disturbing my own machine. Then, when I'm more comfortable with it, and I have a little more time, I'll feel a little more confident installing it "for real" on its own machine.

Someone posted a much longer list a few months ago, but off the top of my head:
AOL Instant Messenger
Yahoo Messenger
VMware Workstation
various Solaris tools

My rants...

Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian OS to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install to a bootable CD-RW.

Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).

I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat's installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft OS'.

With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.

More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.

The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.

I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.

...it's just VMWare ESX Server for Solaris then ?

It's probably an interesting tool for hosting companies that wish to sell Solaris ('root')-servers...

Is this similar to running multiple instances of VMWare or Bochs?

Well, that's a truth with modifications. The VMWare ESX server uses Linux more like a bootloader that using it as the base OS (mutch like Netware did/does with DOS or whatever).

ESX FAQ

Does ESX Server Run on Linux? On Windows? ESX Server runs natively on server hardware, without a host operating system. This allows it to more fully manage the hardware resources and provide the highest levels of security and performance isolation. ESX Server also incorporates a console operating system based on a Linux 2.4 kernel that is used to boot the ESX Server virtualization layer. It also runs ESX Server administration applications.

I satisfy my corporate requirement for Microsoft by running it under Linux in VMware.

As a client or a host, Linux with VMware is a much better decision than cygwin with XP hacks to make the UI feel like Linux. It never completely satisfies.

Michael.

step C could be frustrating, is there a quicker way to go about it?

You could making your changes to a User-mode Linux kernel to avoid the reboot. Or running it inside a virtual machine. That way you only have the kernel's boot time, not the main system BIOS, ATA-100 BIOS, SCSI BIOS, etc.

Also, what is the likely() and unlikely() functions you speak of. Google shows a lot of unrelated info.

They're macros that tell the compiler if the expression contained within is likely to be true or false. There's an article about them here. If you've ever seen any code that mentions __builtin_expect, it's the same thing with better names:

#if COMPILER_SUPPORTS_BUILTIN_EXPECT
#define likely(condition) __builtin_expect(!!(condition), 1)
#define unlikely(condition) __builtin_expect(!!(condition), 0)
#else
#define likely(condition) (condition)
#define unlikely(condition) (condition)

If you need both windows and linux software wine is an alternative... But have you tried vmware ?

I use it at work to run virtual machines on linux and at home (with the work license so dont tell anyone...)on windows. It works perfectly well with debian as server and as a VM! (although its not officially supported, so some extra effort is required... but knoppix is the easy way to go)

VM is technically very different from wine but has lots of advantages.
Its much more, so the problem (for users like me...) is the price (i think 300$).

Does anybody know about any other solution? How about starting an open source virtual machine project? Now that would be great!! ;-)

Allegiance uses DirectPlay v6 for networking which sadly means networking issues when clients play behind a NAT. This is because (much like active FTP) the server will need to make a connection back to the client.

DirectX: Ports Required to Play on a Network
Allegiance Error Message: Your Connection to the Game Server Was Lost
Allegiance Error Message: Failed to Connect to the Lobby

If they are using UPnP on their NAT router it should just "work" and an (almost) unlimited number of players can play from behind the router. This is because UPnP dynamically handles the details listed below.

If they don't have UPnP running they must either map the entire set of possible inbound ports (see above) or throw their client completely in the DMZ. Either way only one such client can play per public IP in this manner.

That said, now that we have the source I'm sure one of the first efforts will be reworking the network code to be more NAT-friendly as well as making it easier to port the server to Unix. -Currently our main game servers are actually run on Linux...inside a VMWare instance running Windows 2003 Server. Not exactly optimal, especially since VMWare has issues with multiple VMs on one box and DirectPlay (odd timing issues that make the server unusable).

ok I think I answered my own question. Here is what vmware says:
"VMware's patented and patent-pending technology serves as the foundation for VMware ESX Server; it is not derived from Linux or FreeBSD." @ VMware ESX Server 2 FAQs

Linux is only used a bootloader, and for I/O to the console on the ESX Server.

Xen has already been covered on slashdot

VMWare costs $300 for the workstation edition.

You need VMware Wrokstation.

Install any version of Windows, DOS (don't make the disk too big, DOS has limits), Linux, Solaris, BSD and others without worrying about rebooting, formatting or partitioning.

Be careful though, you may want to buy a bigger hard drive to keep all your fake HD images on once you get addicted to operating systems.

Mod parent up, doing this with CDs would be painful and time consuming. I used to work at a facility managing firewalls worldwide for a multinational, our requirements for regular machine resets weren't all that dissimilar from a testbed (although on a larger scale) - and this is exactly how it was done.

Another alternative to consider, which especially considering your mixed environment, might be better for you, is virtualization - e.g. using VMWare as described here. This avoids the need to image the machine entirely.

However, the processor is just a part of it. A high-end Sun boxes offers muliple PCI buses as well as other I/O interfaces. It is I/O throughput that makes high-end commercial computers for most people. The other issue is execution domains. This allows you to assign procesors to domains that run particular processes. This gives you fine grained control over who runs what. When IBM runs Linux on a Z series, they run multiple instances of Linux as virtual machines under a host operating system. VMs can be assigned processors to allow them to increase their power or redundancy. However VMs can and do share processors. The problem is that the host system is propietary IBM. There are efforts to do this with Linux, such as VMWARE, or as open-source, Xen but they don't cover the issue of multiprocessing management.

High-end CPU chips can compete, they just need the on-chip hardware to facilitate interlocking but what they really need is a lot of glue chips to allow efficient shared memory use. Building the big boxes that support multiprocessing with more than 2 processors isn't easy. Adding fast I/O channels to keep pace is even less easy. However, I do have big hopes for the Opteron based motherboards though.

Note that clustering helps only when you have loosely coupled cooperation between processes. If you need lots of closely interacting processes or threads then a cluster isn't really fast enough.

To make life easy and save you the hassle of partitioning, have a look at VM ware virtual machines. You can run up a fake box while you play in Windows to test out the installation, configuration and use of your Linux system. I have VM's for different distros, and they run under both Linux and Windows if you get both packages.

You can download the ISO images from FTP for your distro and mount them as CD devices in your VM, saving CDs and making life convenient for yourself. Try running up a VM with Linux in it while your Windows system in the background is downloading another distro.

There is no way in hell I will install that spyware invested crap called Kazaa Media Desktop.

Man I'd love to have a mail server distro. Just run the install, then get a little wizard thing that asks the questions it needs to know to be configured, then boom, you have a mail server.

That's pretty much exactly what SuSE did with their Openexchange server. Instead of attempting to build a product that works on any Linux distribution, they just attached a purpose-specific Linux distribution to it. You don't install this product on top of your out-of-the-box Linux; you instead boot from the CD and you install it all at once.

VMware ESX Server does the same thing.

Install VMware workstation 4. The only disadvantage is the $299 price tag.

Using VMware ESX on a SAN with the new VMware Virtual Center is simply amazing... you can migrate machines from one physical box (running ESX 2.0.1) to another in a few seconds (depeding of the amount of virtual memory allocated to the guest OS).

To me the purchase by EMC of VMware is a great move (therefore Dell is also a winner). Now we can all hope for better EMC support for Multipathing and Cluster support on their Clariion storage arrays.

(IMHO) The company that will suffer from this IBM, as I believe the support for IBM's FAStT, will slowdown a bit.

VMware: $299
Mini-ITX machines: $209 each

Now, you only need one of the VMWare's but you might need two or more of the mini-ITX's. Also, that's the bare-bones mini-ITX; I listed it as old 4 to 10 GB harddrives are basically free around where I work, and I would install my OS to that harddrive in another machine, shove it in the bare bones mini-ITX, and not put in the CDROM or floppy.

Still, if someone offered me a choice between two of those mini-itx's and a full licensed version of VMWare in the package, I know what I'd do -- the mini-ITX.

Have you tried VMware?

I gave up trying to use Debian's installer long ago. I typically boot Knoppix and then do a network install using the debootstrap command. Although, I tried a debian-installer CD image lately (inside VMware -- VMware is great), and it worked quite well for me.

I'm still on windows though. Linux has other problems that need solutions before I move over (and I really wanna ditch XP.)

Ever considered buying the Crossover Plugin and either Win4Lin or VMware?

I have, and I can definitely say that, since I started using these three programs, I have never needed to boot Windows natively to do anything (though I don't typically play Win32 3D games, but I think VMware might support these now).

It involves shelling out a bit of money, but it's worth it!

Two things...

First, I've been using Virtual PC now for many years under both Mac and Windows and I have yet to come across an example of where Connectix went out of their way to support Linux. That Linux runs under Virtual PC is a testiment to the quality of Linux as an operating system and Virtual PC as a x386 emulator, but as far as I can tell, no special effort has been made to support Linux under VPC.

Second, in my view it is likely that Redmond explored the possibility of hobbling Linux under VPC, but found that to do so would either a) entail a rewrite of significant portions of the code, or b) damage compatibility with Windows applications that currently run under VPC, so they decided that c) it just wasn't worth it. Why else wait this long to make this announcement?

When my current copy of Virtual PC on Windows becomes antiquated for whatever reason, I will replace it with VMWare. Hopefully, this will happen at the same time I go AMD64, and I will switch from running Windows as my host OS to running Linux.

Virtual PC on Macintosh has already become antiquated for my purposes, and I have solved that by ceasing to use the Macintosh for everything save development.

You don't have a clue what these VM's are, do you? It's VMWare or Virtual PC.

We're not talking about compiling the kernel here, just Internet, Office, mail and IM (which covers 99% of usage).

I don't think the poster actually meant 99%, or does he really think that gaming only constitutes 1% of computer usage? So, I'll parse this as 80%, as in the 80/20 rule.

This 80/20 rule is one of the great myths of computer usage.

See this article for a fascinating breakdown of this gilded golden rule.

Even if you figure the 80/20 rule is accurate, the question is... WHICH 20% are you going to implement? To satisfy which 80% of the users?

It just doesn't work that way. 99% of users are NOT going to use just a browser, office, email, and IM. Plenty will want to do HTML Editing, or use TurboTax, or play GTA Vice City, or any of a zillion things that Linux isn't quite up to.

Now, before you lught up the torch, realize that I'm typing this on Moz 1.2.1 on RH 9. But, in sincerity, as an independent software developer, I use VMWare to boot Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP on this computer system - often 2 or 3 at a time. I also use one of these VM sessions to run DreamWeaver
to edit HTML templates for client sites. I'm still using DW 4.0, if they come out with a newer version for Linux, I'll buy. (anybody listening over there?) I have 10 of my 160 GB of HD space set aside to run Win98 so that I can play games on the weekend. (Try getting GTA working under Wine....)

In short, even while I'm a big Linux fan, and maintain dozens of Linux systems, I claim that while Linux is (almost) ready, the world is not. Here's what I'd like to see done to your standard GNU/Linux distro to accellerate the inevitable switchover:

1) Binary API for hardware drivers in the kernel, and good, complete documentation of this API should be open and public. NVidia and Creative should be able to distribute binary drivers for their hardware without causing people to age prematurely. This binary API should be as similar to WinXX's PnP driver API as possible to minimize the cost and expense of maintenance.

2) The OEM contracts that MS has with the various vendors should be outlawed, or at least forcibly modified so that there are no penalties for including competitors' software.

3) Something OPEN that will interface with MS Exchange Server, and/or something OPEN that will provide the same functionality of MS Exchange Server. There are some projects that have *some* of the functionality, but nothing has yet jumped out and ahead that really covers either base.

4) X11 is about to be obviated. Quartz/Aqua on the Mac, and Longhorn both provide a much better UI experience. X11 is based on 1970's technology. Unfortunately, I'm not the guy to provide this in *any* way. But we need a good, 3D capable UI/API that can communicate with the X11 protocol. Probably based on OpenGL.

I'm not worried. I deploy on Open Source platforms all the time. I've seen enough improvements in the last 4 years (RedHat 5.2 is my starting point in the OSS world) to give me extreme amounts of confidence. I would've s--t my pants 4 years ago at the RH 9 desktop in front of me, and I'm well aware that it's not even the best desktop!

vmware's ESX supports Linux.

IIRC VMWare3 is now "free" for use-

VMWare4 (providing signifigant other abilities) is the premium paid version.

Look here: http://www.vmware.com/download/

I would like to be able to share proc, mem, disk, and net resources across multiple machines (as is partially implemented in openMosix) AND run multiple instances of Linux on a single system (as in User-mode Linux). These two features combined would provide the ultimate solution in hardware resource flexibility and scalability in large server deployments. It looks like VMware Server provides similar functionality, but with cross-platform capabilities and at a cost of over $1500 per processor.

Make it whatever you want and mount it in a VMware machine if you aren't bothered about the speed from one of your operating systems.

Yeah, I know, VMware is for people who don't have the balls to switch to Linux full time, but it makes interoperability 100% successful if speed isn't a concern.

VMware site.

'The chip will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system as easily as today's Windows computers run Word and Internet Explorer simultaneously.'

Actually, I've found that VMware doesn't work with quite a lot of the x86 OS-es I've tried (and on their website there's something to that effect).

BeOS doesn't work, neither does QNX or OS/2. I'm having a heck of a time getting Solaris x86 to work as well (doesn't seem to like the HDD being presented as a SCSI device, must be IDE, although I've installed actual Solaris x86 machines with SCSI HDDs before without problems).

VMare can run your stock OS on a VM whithout the need to tweak it. [sic]

Not entirely correct. Conceptually, VMWare runs in its own virtual machine, so that the O/S does not know it's in a VM. Reality, however, is that the virtualization is not complete - so you can't just run any old goofy O/S - you have to use one of the supported systems, and which operating system you intend to run has to be explicitly specified when you set up a VM.

I can attest to this since I use VMWare W/S 3.x

If they ever release the XP binary you will have to bet that it will be some hight priced version of xp that runs it. Or else you will run into all kind of license problems.

If it will be a concurrent of The virtual machine solution they bought from connectix This will not be released.

And if it will work with a standard XP home/pro you will have all kind of activation loopholes like in vmware.

First, why do you want to do this in the first place? You can get many of the benefits of "Thin Clients" by using a networked filesystem to store applications and configuration data, but still run the applications on the client PC. Also, you'll probably need less servers for this approach, since they'll just be networked disk servers, not application servers.

In my experience, the big benefit of having a Citrix server is being able to run Windows applications from clients that are not x86-based. For example, if the client is running Solaris on SPARC, but needs access to a Windows-only application, then that client can just access it through Citrix. Then any slowness from the network or the (loaded) server is somewhat acceptable, seeing as how you couldn't otherwise run the application. But that doesn't sound like the case at all in your scenario.

Also, you might want to see what VMWare has to offer; they are also in the x86 Server virtualization market.

Now, times are different. Companies like Yahoo and especially Microsoft are aggressively investing in building the kinds of complex yet user-friendly search capabilities that Google has. Microsoft will soon have a search engine that rivals or exceeds the capabilities of Google's search engine. Google is doomed.

Internet-search tools is not the only market with a low barrier to entry. Another such market is the market for virtual machines. Consider the virtual machine monitor (VMM) sold by VM Ware. It did excellent marketing of a very simple idea -- and a very old idea. VMM was invented by IBM and has been around since the 1960s. The theory of VMM has been well documented and understood in the scientific literature. VMWare took the idea of VMM and simply applied it to the x86 chips. VMWare's genius is in marketing its product as though it were a revolutionary breakthrough. Most of its customers bought the marketing campaign with hook, line, and sinker.

Microsoft is now investing millions of dollars in VMMs and purchased the key VMM technologies from Connectix. Microsoft has succeeded in creating a VMM that rivals or exceeds the capabilities of the VMM sold by VMWare. VMWare is doomed.

Unlike both Google and VMWare, Microsoft has an R&D budget of billions of dollars. Microsoft can defeat both Google and VMWare in their respective markets. Despite public declarations to the contrary, both Google and VMWare are warily aware of Microsoft's R&D might and are working quickly towards an IPO while there is still chance for an IPO. If you buy stock in either Google or VMWare, you might as well just burn the money. It will be worthless.

... from the desk of the reporter

If you have enough RAM and disk space then you can always run whatever windows app you like with even better performance than windows itself with VMWare

...on a friend's machine and download vmware

i used it to install and run visual studio .net on my redhat box. i think that's pretty impressive.

given the money someday, i will actually purchase a copy from them, it is outstanding software.

QuantumG, I didn't even realize it was you the first time! Sorry if I messed up your 'facts' there, buddy.

Anyhow, here's the link; cheers!

Actually ESX technology is not based on either:
The following is a passage from http://www.vmware.com/products/server/esx_faqs.htm l: "VMware's patented and patent-pending technology serves as the foundation for VMware ESX Server; it is not derived from Linux or FreeBSD." However vmware's GSX technology can run on either Linux or Windows.

In light of the RealPC and VirtualPC problems, people may want to politely request that VMWare make their Workstation product available for Mac OS X:

feature-request@vmware.com

VMWare

In light of the RealPC and VirtualPC problems, people may want to politely request that VMWare make their Workstation product available for Mac OS X:

feature-request@vmware.com

VMWare