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I once heard a rumor of a guy with 10 computers in his house and 10 UO accounts. He played on one of the computers, he left the other 9 running 24/7 (minus shard downtime) macroing various profitable tasks.

I just had an idea to keep costs down in setting up such an environment, but I've never played a MMORPG, so I first have a question: how processor-intensive is the game?

The idea is this: purchase a fairly high-end machine (dual Athlon MP2600, 2x 200 GB drives, 4 GB RAM, etc. for $2750), a license for VMware for $329, and set up your 10 "computers" running under VMware, giving 256 MB to each, using 2560 MB and leaving about 1.5 GB free for the host OS to run. (The configuration I chose didn't include Windows XP, which costs $69 at that store, so I'd run Linux and buy the Linux version of VMware.)

As far as software goes, you're pretty much paying the same price -- you would need a license for each copy of Windows running inside the VMs, and you'd need to purchase 10 copies of the game (plus 10 subscriptions).

However, this would save a lot of real estate (1 computer vs. 10 in your parents' basement ;-), and it would also save on electricity costs.

Do you know of anyone who's tried such a solution? I would imagine there are drawbacks, like that you can only "control" one at a time, but you could get a big monitor and have 4 (or 9?) of them visible at the same time. And of course, if the host OS crashes or needs to be rebooted, then all the machines go down (which is why I'd run Linux as the host OS).

Now this is a big bank, with thousands of desktops, and very strict policies on what you can run on your desktop (ie: you can run the heavily modded and locked down corporate build of Windows 2000, or you can work elsewhere), and this guy, global head of one of the two network security bits flaunted the rules - talk about setting an example.

He ran VMWare on his Red Hat box, and had the corporate build of Windows 2000 running on that.

He took great delight in quietly telling the story that he ran up Red Hat, and ran up the virtual machine with the corporate build on it and asked the 'corporate build' team to check it out and tell him if they found anything up with it. They didn't.

When you consider that around 50% of this particular corporate's network security is in the hands of someone who behaves like this, you start to wonder how secure some of these large corporates can possibly be!

The article mentions VMWare. This is a truly
excellent application that runs in Windows and Linux and fully virtualizes
the hardware. You literally "switch on" a machine in a VMWare window and
you see a BIOS startup and then your favorite operating system starts.

You can do things like run Linux as your main operating and have Windows
as a Window within your window manager. Or you could run Windows as your
main operating system and have Linux in a window. In addition you can have
multiple versions of each OS. I have, for testing purposes, Windows 98,
Windows XP and RedHat Linux as VMWare images, at any time I can boot into
a clean version of them and test software. At the end of the session VMWare
asks me if I want to save the changes that have occurred in that session. If I
say "no" then none of the changes get committed to disk. For Windows that means
even the registry, so I am guaranteed a pristine environment next time.

At my company about 25% of people run Linux as their desktop with Windows in a
VM and the others the other way around. It's very cool...

John.

>>Have you ever tried to write portable code with
>>only one machine to test it on? It isn't easy.

Try using VMWare and it becomes very easy to write and test code for multiple OS and configurations.

should it ?
Point is linux can crash. Don't blam windows if drivers crash it as well.

You still have yet to dispute the ATA and SMP issues. Do they not exist ?

Nobody has brought up the cost of licensing VMWare. I have no idea what sort of volume discounts are available, but I know that a single Workstation license certainly isn't free. Wouldn't it be easier to set up a bunch of Citrix/Terminal Services servers and have just the client on the linux machines? It would be a lot easier to maintain, and the hardware requirements on the workstations would be vastly reduced.

Plus, how is alienating your 14,000 users a good thing? Fine, the decision has been made to switch to Linux, but I don't see how "making it hard for them to use Windows" (to quote another poster) is beneficial to the organisation. If the decision has been made then deal with it, take some affirmative action, don't expect the users to get pissed off by themselves and figure out how "this linux thing" (or the German equivalent) works.

Rather than give you a whole bunch of details about what "I" do that will add a lot of noise to the discussion, I'll point you toward the actual tools that may be of help in creating your own workflow:

scarse for command-line calibration and profiles work (pre-built rpms can be had at the rpm search sites, see also patches if you want to compile yourself.)

And of course these days there are also additionals things that you can do some tasks related to color management:

Photoshop and some other tools from device vendors in the Windows world will run under Crossover Office (I use PS6 mysefl).

Some basic (very basic) stuff also exists for GIMP if you are so inclined.

VMware is helpful if you need to run applications in a real Windows environment from within Linux with device support, including support for USB.

Finally if you are a coder you may find littlecms to be useful as well.

I saw a TC1000 in a store, and totally fell in love with the physical design: it's a tablet and a laptop with an oversized swivel screen. But I was put off by the Crusoe processor. I had a Sony sub-laptop that used it, and there was a nasty delay starting new apps. Didn't seem very economical of power either, though maybe you can blame that on Sony featuritis.

The device includes secret digital keys -- large binary numbers -- that cannot easily be altered.

Easily? They would probably say that Windoze is an OS that could not easily be replicated as well.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I know quite a few people who will poor their lives into doing something that someone else says "cannot be done easily." (...and will almost definitely succeed)
(begin M$-Rant)
Also, I believe Microsoft falls under Murphy's Law, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he [Bill] will find it."
(end M$-Rant)

• Install slackware.
• Break Slackware, curse excessively.
• Install Debian, get everything set up, and then break it all at once with one bad apt command. Curse.
• Find my copy of FreeBSD 5.0, install, compile a few ports, work.

I realize your budget probably does not support it, but hey, maybe you are lucky, or very persuasive with the board. ;)

I used to teach some 1-on-1 classes, and to facilitate this I use a linux box with VMware installed. When booted, it goes straight into a minimal X, and runs VMware, which in turn boots the OS du jour.

This allows me to run virtual windows 95/98/2000/linuxes, or indeed to allow my pupils to mess with the installion (and destruction) of those OS'es. Since it has a 'discard changes made during session' option, the OS always rolls back to the known, safe, optimal & virus free state, unless specifically told not to (by me).

A small bash script watches over the vmware thread, and if it dies spawns a new one.

Count the amount of hours spent reinstalling/reconfiguring/rebooting, weigh it against the price of a VMware license.

YMMV

So while I'd love to get this up and running for The Powers that Be, until something that's even more advanced and is guaranteed to support Windows 2000 or XP only apps comes along, no endorsement here can be made.

So while I'd love to get this up and running for The Powers that Be, until something that's even more advanced and is guaranteed to support Windows 2000 or XP only apps comes along, no endorsement here can be made.

I mean, if you want to use Windows applications, just install the Windows that came free with your computer. For the cost of Win4Lin or Wine, you can get a whole nother hard drive to dedicate to Windows, and it will be fully compatible.

Are you trolling on purpose or are you just ignorant? First, Windows is not free. The cost is built in to the machine, so you pay for it one way or another. Second, I am not willing to waste 3 to 8 minutes every single time I need to bring up IE (to verify a page I am developing renders half way correct) or some other such thing, so I run IE and a couple of other windows apps (games that were given to me by a friend) in WINE.

On a related note, how come there are no Linux emulators for Windows? Is it because Windows has better alternatives to any Linux program, or is there some sort of GPL patent issue?

OK, here you are showing just plain ignorance. There are machine emulators out there. Have you ever hear of Bochs or VMWare? Both of them are available for windows and Linux (and some other OSes) and both will emulate a machine well enough to run windows, linux, and some other OSes. Those just happen to be the two I know of the top of my head without searching, I'm sure there are others.

I've only used Windows in VMware in linux - which works well, but takes a while to boot up (and there's still no 3d support). How does Win4Lin compare to vmware for this... anyone?

if you have fast Windows XP box...

I have a VM on my fast XP gaming machine just for this reason, to compile stuff for my BSD server.

As a side note, if you can't find a big enough list, you can always load the spyware on a test machine.

It's even possible to execute two or more identical test systems on their own private "ethernet bridge" to watch the scanning and propagation behavior of a virus or worm.

The only thing Windows can't do is run on top of Linux :).

Sure it can, using VMware, Win4Lin, Bochs or Plex86.

Yes. ;)

Is emulation a crime? Then what will happen with these guys? There must be some clever way to nuke redmond without harming any m$ lovers.

ople like me who keep dual-boot on my workstati

try vmware betas
Never dual boot again.

I just upgraded to 2.5.64 with Linus's patch ( mentioned yesterday) merged in.

I am running Gentoo and I first installed the gentoo-optimized 2.4.20 kernel. When I read the article yesterday I decided to make the jump to 2.5.64 + patch. Holy wow, Batman.

I'm running Gentoo under VMware on a dual 2.2 GHz Xeon (only 1 processor makes it through to the virtual machine, though). After figuring out that I needed new modutils, I had everything up and running. I started up a kernel compile with make -j 2 to really try and saturate the system, and moved the mouse around. The mouse was silky smooth, KDE quickly and properly recognized mouse-overs and everything was just so nice. I then booted back to 2.4.20 and ran the same test. Oh the pain! The mouse was chunky, KDE didn't even try and do mouseover animations.. it was horrible. I've switched grub to default to the 2.5 kernel and I'm not going back.

That said, this is a play machine and does nothing important. So if it crashes more often (no crashes yet), then it doesn't really bother me..

Actually VMware itself has a "product" which does exactly what you're talking about. It's "headless", which I found out (after three separate e-mails to VMware sales) means "display-less" (i.e., you don't have to run it in X). It would be interesting to know what independent assessments of effectiveness of their product are out there....

However, it is ridiculously expensive (as in more than buying actual machines). So much so that ESX escapes VMware's pricing page. To get the price, you have to call so they can make sure you're sitting down before you hear it (ESX is more expensive than GSX).

By the way, if any of the information presented here is not correct, I can convincingly shift blame onto some of the ridiculous and confusing marketing speak on VMware's site. That being said, I run VMware 3.2 and like it for running a desktop version of Windoze until the world finishes rejecting it.

Actually VMware itself has a "product" which does exactly what you're talking about. It's "headless", which I found out (after three separate e-mails to VMware sales) means "display-less" (i.e., you don't have to run it in X). It would be interesting to know what independent assessments of effectiveness of their product are out there....

However, it is ridiculously expensive (as in more than buying actual machines). So much so that ESX escapes VMware's pricing page. To get the price, you have to call so they can make sure you're sitting down before you hear it (ESX is more expensive than GSX).

By the way, if any of the information presented here is not correct, I can convincingly shift blame onto some of the ridiculous and confusing marketing speak on VMware's site. That being said, I run VMware 3.2 and like it for running a desktop version of Windoze until the world finishes rejecting it.

Huh? Many of the software packages I use are configured via plaintext files and perform extremely well, and are very easy to maintain in an enterprise enviroment.

Vmware Investors

VMware ESX is NOT based on Red Hat. It's a proprietary kernel. Red Hat is only used as the Console OS (not the same as a Host OS on VMware Workstation or VMware GSX departmental server). So a Open Source operating system is used to install VMware ESX and boot the system, then it hands over the control of the system to the vmkernel (which is optimized for performance and resource allocation). Because vmkernel is such a specific system, it only supports a limited amount of drivers. Select servers from Dell, HP/Compaq and IBM are well supported. The mother of all servers to run VMware ESX at an enterprise level is the IBM xSeries 440.

The next level of VMware product that is announced is VMware Virtual SMP. This will bridge the gap for enterprises that want to run virtual machines requiring multiprocessing but cannot do this with the current release of VMware ESX.

I truly believe that the VMware solutions are probably the best thing since sliced bread (I'm too young to have lived the MVS-era).

VMware ESX is NOT based on Red Hat. It's a proprietary kernel. Red Hat is only used as the Console OS (not the same as a Host OS on VMware Workstation or VMware GSX departmental server). So a Open Source operating system is used to install VMware ESX and boot the system, then it hands over the control of the system to the vmkernel (which is optimized for performance and resource allocation). Because vmkernel is such a specific system, it only supports a limited amount of drivers. Select servers from Dell, HP/Compaq and IBM are well supported. The mother of all servers to run VMware ESX at an enterprise level is the IBM xSeries 440.

The next level of VMware product that is announced is VMware Virtual SMP. This will bridge the gap for enterprises that want to run virtual machines requiring multiprocessing but cannot do this with the current release of VMware ESX.

I truly believe that the VMware solutions are probably the best thing since sliced bread (I'm too young to have lived the MVS-era).

VMware ESX is NOT based on Red Hat. It's a proprietary kernel. Red Hat is only used as the Console OS (not the same as a Host OS on VMware Workstation or VMware GSX departmental server). So a Open Source operating system is used to install VMware ESX and boot the system, then it hands over the control of the system to the vmkernel (which is optimized for performance and resource allocation). Because vmkernel is such a specific system, it only supports a limited amount of drivers. Select servers from Dell, HP/Compaq and IBM are well supported. The mother of all servers to run VMware ESX at an enterprise level is the IBM xSeries 440.

The next level of VMware product that is announced is VMware Virtual SMP. This will bridge the gap for enterprises that want to run virtual machines requiring multiprocessing but cannot do this with the current release of VMware ESX.

I truly believe that the VMware solutions are probably the best thing since sliced bread (I'm too young to have lived the MVS-era).

VMware ESX is NOT based on Red Hat. It's a proprietary kernel. Red Hat is only used as the Console OS (not the same as a Host OS on VMware Workstation or VMware GSX departmental server). So a Open Source operating system is used to install VMware ESX and boot the system, then it hands over the control of the system to the vmkernel (which is optimized for performance and resource allocation). Because vmkernel is such a specific system, it only supports a limited amount of drivers. Select servers from Dell, HP/Compaq and IBM are well supported. The mother of all servers to run VMware ESX at an enterprise level is the IBM xSeries 440.

The next level of VMware product that is announced is VMware Virtual SMP. This will bridge the gap for enterprises that want to run virtual machines requiring multiprocessing but cannot do this with the current release of VMware ESX.

I truly believe that the VMware solutions are probably the best thing since sliced bread (I'm too young to have lived the MVS-era).

Like you can already with VMWare (fantasic app imho, tested 3 Linux distrubtions and FreeBSD without partitioning, or risking any of my data)
or get all you beed of a UNIX-a-like from Cygwin.

They happen to be two different companies...

VMware

Connectix

I wonder if the problem is that vmware's virtual BIOS won't allow you to scrozzle the boot sector?

(VMware is a great product, BTW -- it's a sort of meta-OS that lets you run multiple virtual machines inside one piece of hardware. I used it to host the International Nethack Tournament this year -- very convenient.)

I think they raised the prices, but I can't find the email they sent me about it, so my best recollection will have to stand.

Rather than let your recollection stand, why not just take a look at the web site? You can see that prices start at $300 and go up from there. The server version is $3000, or $6000, depending on configuration.

https://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/newstore/index. jsp

They used to have a limited version that would only run Windows 98 as a guest, and they got rid of that.

steveha

Does anyone know if Solaris 9 will run on Connectix Virtual PC and VMware?

So do web sites, FTP, and email. Shall we make it illegal to write web browsers too?

many people do use it to break the encryption scheme so they can rip and distribute movies. Is this necessarily what we want? If movie companies don't get paid for there work they'll stop making movies, blahda blahda

I'd much rather live in a world with fewer movies than in a world where Hollywood is allowed to dictate what programs I can write or use on my own computer.

Additionally, while this is not a popular idea around here, isn't it the companies right to decide that they only want their disks to play on windows systems?

Companies have every right to decide what is done with their property. However, once they sell a disk to me, it becomes my property, and at that point it should be up to me (and only me) how I use it.

I don't see anyone saying that people should be allowed to hack popular windows only games to run on liniux, so why should movies be different?

There is no argument about that because everybody agrees that it should be allowed. Products such as WineX and VMWare allow you to play windows-only games under Linux.

To get past the spurious detection of a debugger, go to the VMware configuration editor and check the "Disable acceleration" box. Once TurboTax starts up, you should be able to uncheck the box again. See this Knowledge Base article for more information.

I work for VMware, but I'm not posting as an official representative.

While I'm thinking about this... you could even run aVMWare virtual machine using a disk image on a PGPDisk encrypted volume. That way you can run any kind of Windows or Linux on a machine where the OS will have no clue that it's entire underlying file system is encrypted.

I have to admit, I was getting ready to hate this project after reading the summary, but before following any links. But after I saw it and thought about it a while, I love it. I'll never use it myself, but I thought, "what better way to help in the process of using those poor lost windows-only souls than make an environment which is so much like what they're used to that they won't notice the difference?"

From my own anecdotal evidence, I find that computer users can usually be classified in one of three groups:

Experts: these are the people who eat, sleep, live the technology for whatever purpose (hobby, professional choice, curiosity, whatever). They are typically curious and will be delighted by anything that does The Right Thing, or works well, or is just plain cool regardless of the source. These people typically have no problem running two or three operating systems on as many boxes (or more, or even less) under / on / in / near their desks / racks / etc. They are the software engineers, the curious hobbyists, the sys admins of large organizations (e.g., universities), the folks that learned how to program at age 12 "just for fun", etc. In the early industry, these made up most of the user base of computers (large and small).

Intermediates or Power Users: these users are typically very familiar with the end-user features of one (maybe two) OSes. They could tell you all kinds of tricks like how to re-order your Apple menu (anyone remember Mac OS 7-9?) by copying and pasting carriage returns into the first part of directory / file names and how to "unstick" Word when it won't load without having to reinstall Office. They know enough to be dangerous on a network, but not enough to properly care for other users. These are typically the most active in the OS religious (flame) wars. As personal computers became more accessible (enter Apple II, IBM PC, etc.), these users began to dominate the population.

Beginners: these are what BOFHs call lusers. They are the most ignorant of the bunch, and typically have an attitude of, "I just want the damned thing to work, I don't care how". These folks know just enough to do what they want to do on a daily basis, but aren't very good at troubleshooting problems when they occur without help. These make up most of the computer-using population today.

There is nothing inherently superior or inferior about any particular group. It's just how things are. To date, it has been extremely hard to convince members of the last two groups (beginners and intermediates) to go outside of their respective comfort zones (i.e., try new operating systems). I believe the middle group is nearly impossible to convert as there are as many emotional ties to their underlying choices as there are knowledge ones.

However, with this project, I think the conversion of the beginners group just got easier by several orders of magnitude. They don't care, as long as it works. If it looks and acts very similar to what they're already used to (and by very similar, I mean exact for day-to-day use and similar for more infrequent tasks like network configuration, etc.), then they are much less likely to notice that they are running Linux vs. Windows. This is a very good thing. Intermediates and experts can still use sawfish or twm or the console or whatever they choose, but beginners now have hope for a viable (and understandable) interface. This is truly wonderful, as an increased user base will help legitimize the efforts of Linux on the desktop. Kudos and respect to the xpde team for some truly outstanding work.

I wouldn't call it SB Live! since it's PCI device. When I tried to run one of Craig's PCI Programs, it wouldn't show up as a PCI device at all.

According to VMWare's support files, it is compatible with an SB16. (Ok, so compatible != actual card, but if they say to use it...)

So, until there is an app as powerful as virtualdub available for linux, i'll be sticking to windows. :)

on PC you can play games from 1980s to 2002

You can't play games from 1981 to 1995 on a computer that primarily boots to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional operating system or a Microsoft Windows XP operating system without emulation or virtualization, because 1. NT operating systems have poor support for DOS apps, and 2. those DOS games that do work with NT may run too fast to be playable.

on PC you can use a lot of freeware/shareware games, Free Software is also much closer to PC than consoles

Same on GBA. Have you played Tetanus On Drugs for GBA?

Actually, they claim that it is a Creative SB16. From Craig's PCI Programs, it doesn't show up as a PCI device, so I'm assuming that it's an ISA/ISA-PnP card. Regardless, I've tried the DOS drivers from Creative Labs, but the DIAGNOSE program says the environment settings are wrong.

What's funny is that it kept on reminding me to install the VMWare tools. When I actually tell it to, it says there are none for this OS (DOS/Win3.x). Go figure.

Bochs?

It's slow enough that WinME complains it's too slow to install (or maybe I didn't configure it right). The only problem is that sometimes it might emulate things a little to fast (1 second on the host computer may equal 5 seconds in the emulation).

Somebody else suggested VMWare, which is ok, but I couldn't get the sound to work in DOS (and I'll know when it will work with my trusty must-have-a-sound-card-to-install game called Privateer 2).

Virtual PC is another PC emulation, but I haven't tried it yet.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've found the safest and most reliable way to run Windows is by using VMWare on Linux with an undoable drive. The only time I commit the changes is after I've rebooted and made specific changes to the OS

This way, whenever anything goes wrong, a simple reboot of windows brings me back to a fresh installtion.

TCO? Well obviously running Linux alone would be better, but I have 1 app that I can't run on Linux, which I need to do my job :(

Win
Mac
Linux
BSD
Unix
Cowboy Neal ate my OS.

However, my family uses Windows. Most of my friends use Windows. Have I mentioned Linux? Of course. Have I forcibly converted them? Absolutely not.

Don't get me wrong -- Linux evangelization is a great thing. People should know that better software exists. But I simply don't understand the rationale of people who want to see Linux on everything. Frankly, I like Linux the way it is (was) -- almost an 'elite club' of computer geeks. I'm not implying that we shouldn't let people use Linux, or that we should keep it a closely guarded secret. I just don't see why we think that my grandma should run Linux -- yes, it can be very easy to use. But what does it matter if she runs Windows or Linux? Her box came with Windows, and it still runs Windows. Today, if it came with Linux, it might run Linux, but if it came with Windows, it would also run Windows.

The point of this lunatic diatribe is this: I think we should 'evangelize' Linux to some extent, but we should really rethink the "Linux on everything!" approach -- do we really want millions of people using Linux? (Applogies if this sounds like a troll, or some sort of insane rant... But I'm trying to pose a serious question.)

Sorry if this sounds like sci-fi, but I have started lately thinking whether it would be possible to launch a tiny REAL OS from within/integrated with the BIOS. A bit like vmware but on a even lower level - I am thinking this might start being possible now that BIOS capabilities are increasing all the time as well. This would provide many interesting possibilities. Do you see this impossible for some reason? The vmware page says : "VMware technology is patented and patent-pending" - does anyone know exactly which patents they have and what limitations do those pose.

if apple can do it

The Classic application environment is more of a virtualized native environment than it is emulation of hardware.

Carbon vs Cocoa, on the other hand, is like Winelib vs Qt, just a different toolkit to access the same underlying graphics system (Quartz or X11).

the onus isnt on the user to recompile

But if your proprietary software publisher refuses to recompile its application for your hardware platform, tough shit. One more reason for free software.

Try running Linux in a VMWare virtual machine on top of Windows XP. You can get them used to Linux with an easy way to switch back to Windows. You're probably going to have to keep Windows around anyway for the kids' games. http://www.vmware.com