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No I don't mean get a copy of MAME, I mean use software like VMware or Plex86 to emulate any of the less resource demanding games. Also, bear in mind Linux has a plethora of FREE games available, many of which I find more mentally stimulating than their win32 based counterparts. And about worrying if it will be user friendly for your kids, computers weren't too user friendly when I was a kid, but I lernt em anyways :) Seriously, just stick your kids on a Linux box and they'll 0wn your root in no time

Photoshop kept me on Windows for a long time. The interface is the only thing that really bugged me about GIMP. Having used Photoshop for about as long as you have, it just never occured to me that I should right-click on my work to save it. Maybe it would if GIMP didn't have a "File" menu in plain sight already. Then I might have thought to look for the option that way, but at first I didn't. Once I learned that "works like Photoshop" doesn't mean "acts like Photoshop" I started liking it a lot more. I still prefer Photoshop, but it's not what keeps my machine booting Windows; it's what keeps me using VMware.

On the sever side the market is much more mature, you can get Oracle on Linux and DB2 for Linux if you want a database. For mail and workflow Lotus Domino is available amongst many others.

IMHO these are either recognised mature products or fulfill a new and/or unique function. A new IM tool does niether of these.

I agree that chroot isn't the best sandbox out there. I prefer Virtual Machines, although they're a little more resource intensive (& not free).

I've been considering running a machine with two interfaces but not assigning it any IP addresses, at least for the "host" OS. Then, I could run one or more servers within virtual machines. For instance, the firewall VM would have access to both interfaces, and have IP addresses on them both. DNS and DHCP servers would only need a LAN interface.

I'd need a decent processor with lots of RAM to pull this off, but imagine the possibilities. Running snort in the host OS on the WAN port would give me stealth IDS capabilities. Running it on the LAN port listening for packets on port 514 would give me a stealth syslogger. Since there's no IP addresses to access the host OS, there's no target to hack!

Now, lets take it a step further and imagine this scenario: The stealth IDS detects with some certainty that my BIND DNS server was once again compromised and a hax0r l0ser is launching a DDoS attack from it. Since the IDS is running on the host OS, it shuts down the offending VM, restores the VM's disk to a known good one and restarts it. Insta-restore!

One other method I've been contemplating that I consider somewhere between VMs and chroots is running the servers under User-mode Linux. I haven't had a chance to play with that yet, so don't know the security imiplications. I can't imagine it would be worse than chroot, and it wouldn't tie up resources as much as VMs do.

I did not read all the posts but hopefully someone else has mentioned VMWare as an alternate solution. Since there are many applications that are available only on Windows, show up first on Windows, or are cheaper for Windows (SlickeEdit, Rational Rose, etc.) being able to access a virtual machine running Windows is pretty nice.

File sharing companies are, at the very best, a dubious bunch. Experience has shown tht they will try to screw up your machine in some way.

So...let them. They'll find some way of doing it eventually anyway. The trick? Just make sure the 'machine' is a virtual machine. I personally use Virtual PC for Windows, but VMWare would do just as well.

Make a blank virtual machine, install your P2P clients on it and take a back-up of that file. Then use that machine for nothing but P2P. The result? Spyware is useless, because there's nothing happening to actually spy on. The machine gets too spyware-ridden? No problem - delete the current machine and restore from that fresh backup you took.

Cheers,
Ian

For all the crapware i use vmware. Sure, you've got to pay for it, but then it'll save you lots of headaches dealing with this stuff. Just use a virtual machine for the crap, and the main one for the real stuff. Probably bochs would also do, though i didn't test it.

Run Win2000 in VMWare under Linux.

Or run Linux in VMWare under Win2000.

Now with User Mode Linux integrated into the cutting edge kernel -- wow! This is like having a built-in custom version of VMware just for running Linux. Awesome. Heck, it is almost like having an IBM 390 of your very own. It does what an IBM mainframe does, but on everyday hardware. Fantastic.

wich is about $299 in its basic downloadable version.

As for the questions asking why, I suppose it's the same reason you might want to run VMware on an Intel machine: develop/test for multiple platforms without rebooting; or get capabilities only available in one or the other without a reboot. What would be much more interesting to me is MOL (or equivalent) for OS X. Just like running Linux or FreeBSD under VMware for Windows, it would allow me to run LinuxPPC or maybe even NetBSD under OS X (Classic already takes care of OS 9, and probably better than this program could). And unlike the VMware on Windows case, my host operating system would be enjoyable to use. ;-)

If you are in the money-saving business, vmware is an alternative if your windows apps don't run under wine. Take note that you will need to pay a license for the the OS on your vmware workstation, but you will save hardware costs, electricity and desk space. The total cost is easily calculated : the license fee for the vmware software + RAM upgrade for your hardware + guest OS and software used on the guest OS. Savings are electricity and desk space.

If the two first factors are less than a new machine, vmware makes little sense for you.

This probably isn't exactly what you were looking for, but I would consider and maybe request an eval of VMware GSX Server or maybe even ESX Server. Both let you monitor the virtual machine over IP -- in fact, there's even a web-based administration interface. And, of course, you can watch BSODs as they happen, hit the reset button using your toolbar, and go into the BIOS setup utility remotely.

Neither is cheap (GSX is the cheaper of the two and runs $3500, $1600 academic) but if you can consolidate your boxes into one big box it might be worth it. After all, it's always good to centralize your points of failure, right?

Big thumbs up for VMware.

This probably isn't exactly what you were looking for, but I would consider and maybe request an eval of VMware GSX Server or maybe even ESX Server. Both let you monitor the virtual machine over IP -- in fact, there's even a web-based administration interface. And, of course, you can watch BSODs as they happen, hit the reset button using your toolbar, and go into the BIOS setup utility remotely.

Neither is cheap (GSX is the cheaper of the two and runs $3500, $1600 academic) but if you can consolidate your boxes into one big box it might be worth it. After all, it's always good to centralize your points of failure, right?

Big thumbs up for VMware.

You can get a windows install to never decay:

1) install favorite OS as the host system.

2) install VMWare

3) install windows as a guest OS. Flavor to taste.

4) set the Guest OS drive to non-persistant. Set you home directory to a share form the Host OS.

5) reboot the guest OS as needed. Everytime you reboot, the system is restored from the image stored on the Host OS. Crap does not stay unless you tell it to stay.

or for slightly different purposes, install the OS and tailor it as you like it. Image partition. Reimage the drive when there is too much fluff and bloat hanging around.

You can get a windows install to never decay:

1) install favorite OS as the host system.

2) install VMWare

3) install windows as a guest OS. Flavor to taste.

4) set the Guest OS drive to non-persistant. Set you home directory to a share form the Host OS.

5) reboot the guest OS as needed. Everytime you reboot, the system is restored from the image stored on the Host OS. Crap does not stay unless you tell it to stay.

or for slightly different purposes, install the OS and tailor it as you like it. Image partition. Reimage the drive when there is too much fluff and bloat hanging around.

Yeah, but then I'll have to pirate VMWare. :P

VMWare 30 day evaluation version, email address required.

Yahoo free email sign-up.

There's always VMware. That way, at least your computer isn't tied to Windows.

Yes, it's a bit more work, and the daemon-tools that everyone's mentioning look nice, but TMTOWTDI, and for me one of the other ways is with VMware.

The other benefit being, if you set it up right, the critter will have his own "sandbox" and can blown up the VM but it's really easy to back up the VM's directory, so when s/he does take the machine down, you can bring it back in a couple minutes of copying, rather than a couple hours of reinstalling.

The drawback? Fast games won't be.

File sharing is a dubious business at best, and most of the companies involved in it will try to manipulate your machine in one way or another.

So...let them. Let them prat about with your machine to their heart's content. Let them install all the spyware in the world. Let them share every file that's ever been placed on it. Just one thing - make sure it's not a real machine.

In other words, make use of the virtual machine programs kicking about. VMWare for most, Virtual PC in my case. Use that machine for nothing but running your P2P clients. No email, no web browsing, nothing. Just run your clients and enjoy. Let them spy on everything happening within that machine, because the only thing happening on that machine is the running of their own software.

Cheers,
Ian

You can use something like Bochs or VMWare to set up a virtual machine and test it out. In theory, anyway. You probably won't notice any of the speed tweaks this way. Or, you could pick up a cheap used Pentium or something similar to run it on. I'm not sure it's worth the effort to see the cutting-edge, though.

Gak, wish I had mod points so I could mod your reply up.

Good points, although I'd never say never if I were you. After all, if they can design an entire virtual machine that can abstract hardware calls to different OSs, I'd imagine that they could do something similar for DirectX/OpenGL.

I'm still not sure if he's just so far removed from the reality of what is going on that he really believes what he's saying, or if he's just impressively two-faced. I suspect the former, just because I don't look for a conspiracy when simple ignorance will do.

26. Given these benefits, we expected that the market would attach great value to any product that enabled such broad interoperability. As I explain more fully below in Section II.B, Microsoft committed itself to providing compatibility among a wide range of products, as we believed the market would demand. There were three key and closely-interrelated elements to our strategy, a strategy that is unchanged to this day.

Literally tens of thousands of hardware and software products interoperate very well with Windows today.

Interoperability across disparate computing products does not happen by accident. Interoperability is a two-way street, requiring a lot of hard work between companies that want to build interoperable products. As discussed below, Microsoft devotes enormous efforts to promoting interoperability between a wide variety of products and Windows. These efforts include our development and broad licensing of the Windows platform (described above) and our disclosure of vast amounts of technical information about Windows--information that we provide to our direct competitors, such as Sun.

What information did Microsoft need to provide to Sun? More likely, they got information from Sun about the various UNIX protocols so they could embrace and extend them.

If Microsoft was really that open with their specifications, wouldn't writing a Win32 emulator be easier? Instead, it seems to actually be simpler to write a working complete PC emulator and rely on Windows' ability to cope well with different hardware to let it run well than it it to duplicate the ever-changing and never-documented Win32 APIs.

I have no doubt that interoperability played a huge role in development at Microsoft. They needed to talk with other software packages and operating systems in order to gain market share.

At the same time, they could leverage their position as the operating system provider to prevent others from doing the same thing to them.

From the earliest days of DOS, they kept their cards close. The use of those (intentionally?) undocumented DOS calls in Excel gave Microsoft a big advantage over Lotus-1-2-3, who had to go in and either re-implement an existing (but unknown) API that Microsoft had in the OS, or reverse engineer the process to find the undocumented calls that the Excel folks had advance notice of. By the same token, Microsof could and did (deliberately?) change the "undocumented" APIs that Lotus relied on while simultaneously changing the new version of Excel to stop using them.

In short, they seem to have a firm handle on the fact that the path to dominance is to make sure your product can interface with others, but don't let the others interface with you.

If you're using decent machines with lots of memory, just set up a virutal computer with VMware. The virtual computer runs as a program in a separate window.

Then you can Alt-Tab between the "computer" running the game, and whatever other real program you're using to handle support calls.

How similar is this to VMWare? I assume they have a similar function, but i tried VMWare out on Mandrake 8.0 and it does run windows faster than native, as advertised.
How does this functionality compare with VPC?
Are they architecturally similar?

VMware works fine on XP as well... Windows complains at the installation because of some uncertified virtual network card drivers, but it works anyway. And it is cheaper (unless you have an additional box anyway), even if you need to buy additional memory.

I'd like to see the ability to switch from Linux/Windows in a keypress, a massive context-switch, but I haven't seen that so far

Well, I've seen that for the past two years, and it's called vmware. You would be doing yourself a big favor to go download it and get emailed a serial for the 30 day trial. If your computer has the strength, you can run windows under linux or vice-versa, or beos, or freebsd, or whatever toots your whistle.

Believe it or not, I have an HP usb scanner that uses some crazy scsi over usb protocol. It doesn't work in linux. BUT if I run win98 on vmware in linux, it's detected, bridged, and available without complaint. Simply incredible.

Your first step is to face a simple nasty fact: you will not find a third-party tool that lets you edit your Frame files. Lots of vendors claim to have foolproof filters for WP formats, but it's all smoke and mirrors. The formats are too complicated, and there's no simple mapping between them. So you only have two choices: find a way to continue using Frame, or make a big one-time conversion of all your files into another format.

The first choice is one I personally would avoid, mainly because I really dislike Frame. But it might be more practical. There are various ways you might go about this: buy everybody VMWare licenses and use it to run the Windows version of Frame. Keep some of your SGI boxes around just to run Frame. (Since Unix Frame is an X app, you should be able to run it remotely. If this doesn't work, there's always terminal servers.) Or run Windows Frame on top of WINE.

In your position, I'd prefer to get away from Frame's proprietary format once and for all. Yes, I know, I just said that foolproof filters don't exist. But if you're willing to invest the effort (a lot of effort, I'm afraid) you can use advanced tools to do a one-time conversion.

The leading tool for this is Webworks Publisher. A limited version, which might be adequate for this task, is provided with FrameMaker 6.0. Pick a convenient XML schema, define a mapping between that schema and various Frame styles and formats, and there you are.

Once you have your documents in XML, you have a lot more options. You'll probably have to do a second transformation to a format of your choice. Why? Two reasons. First, the big XML authoring vendors seem to have no interest in Linux. (You might find something from a small vendor or in Open Source. But I've been thoroughly underwealmed by the offerings I've seen.) Second, your users will probably balk at becomming markup wonks. Not everybody want to think about document structure every time they dash off a memo.

Fortunately transforming XML into other formats is not a big deal.

Advocates of Abiword and similar programs will protest. Abiword uses XML as a native format. Why not just go directly from Frame to that format?

The problem is that the Abiword schema is a "data" schema -- it's all one big packet of rich text, with no attempt to isolate formatting. It's like RTF or MIF, only easier to parse. So when you transform something into Abiword XML, you're going to lose any information that Abiword doesn't know how to manage.

But Abiword might be a good choice anyway. It claims to have an XML/Docbook filter. If that woirks half-decently, you can transform your frame files into XML/Docbook (which is a very rich format, so you'd probably lose very little information). Keep your legacy files in that format, and import them into Abiword as needed. If Abiword proves unable to handle some of your more complex files, you can look at other alternatives.

Which is the great beauty of XML. If your current XML app isn't working out, there's always another one.

Which is not to say that XML is a magic bullet. XML transformations are tricky. A lot of XML technology is still under development. And, as Abiword and HTML demonstrate, you can't assume that you have the full power of markup flexability just because your documents use XML or SGML syntax.

The only advice you'll get here will be along the lines of "Install Linux and Wine". :)

Or you could try vmware and set up a virtual retro machine for games.

For those of you who don't know, VMWare is a way in which multiple virtual machines can be created on your desktop. What VMWare actually does is it isolates a section of hard drive (appears as a regular file in Linux) and isolates sections of memory (I've had up to 128 MB allocated) and runs a "virtual machine" which runs through a "BIOS" and can do pretty much everything that another computer can do, including running Windows 98 Games!

So, has anybody got this running under VMWare yet?

I'm not convinced there is a big market for running windows apps on Linux, but if thats what you want to do, VMware is the painless way to do it, and it lets you run other OSs as well, or multiple instances of the same OS on the same machine, and with RAM prices as low as they are, this approach makes a lot of sense, especially if you need to do cross-platform development.

This hibernation mode snapshot can be duplicated or even put on other machines in the event of a system failure. The virtual machine will then come back online like nothing ever happened, with hardware devices effectively still attached and processes still running.

It works really slick, you can perform other tasks and come back to your virtual machine later without slow boot times. This will also work on Linux, Solaris, and Windows platforms. I'd highly recommend VMware for on-demand OS access.

-Pat

This might be completely wrong, but couldn't you use something like vmware and 'suspend virtual machine'.

I'm pretty sure that when you started up your virtual machine, your program would still be running.

It depends on the configuration of your VM. VMWare allows three types of networking:

- Bridged Networking
- Network Address Translation (NAT)
- Host-Only Networking

All of which have different behaviors. For more details, see the VMWare Networking page.

VMware [vmware.com] is a good solution for those windows apps you can't let go

So instead of letting go of your Windows apps, you let go of your money. VMware Workstation costs $300, and Windows 2000 Pro for VMware costs $200 plus the connect time to download the service packs. How again do you prevent people from cracking or infecting your box while you download from Windows Update? On the other hand, a year of TransGaming costs only $60.

I haven't tried to run WinMX with WINE yet. Has anyone?

According to CodeWeavers' app database, most features of WinMX work, but you need a copy of Windows to run the installer.

VMware is a good solution for those windows apps you can't let go - although a Linux client would be great! I haven't tried to run WinMX with WINE yet. Has anyone?

To run multiple linux instances on one "middle of the road" server, you need VMWare GSX. It ain't free. In fact, it's $3,550.00. (there goes your "a lot less money" idea, T.)

As for the value of this product, I see it clearly. Not all computational problems need high data throughput between nodes. And their Redstone-A product gives you an 8 node PIII 1Ghz cluster with 4GB of ram for $6000. And all the networking set up and ready to go. Give it to your Scientist and they don't need to know jack about network or configuration, they just treat it like another unix workstation.

When I think of the ~ $20k each we spend on Sun and SGI workstations for our scientists, I cringe. This I wouldn't (won't?) think twice about buying.

Red Hat's market capatalization is about $1.45e9.

AOL could get all the functionality they need with a minimal custom distro and a few extra apps. Take a dozen programmers about six months, for a total cost of about 0.1% of the cost of Red Hat. They also wouldn't have to worry about all the good folks at Red Hat jumping ship.

Biggest problem would be getting it to play nice with Windows. Perhaps they should buy VMWare instead?

Unfortunately, the Big Shots know a lot about how to take over companies, and very little about technical matters.

If you don't have a spare PC laying around, VMWare is a pretty spectacular way to get your hands dirty without having to worry about completely hosing your development machine on accident. The only thing you really can't do with VMWare is hardware level drivers, for obvious reasons.

If you really want to get gritty on the emulation level, I highly recommend Bochs. It's a fully functional x86 emulator, and since it's open source, it comes with some nifty options, and the source code is on hand if you really need to get tricky.

I think the key to working efficiently with an x86 emulator/virtualizer is having a significant amount of RAM, and a RAM disk to mount your virtual drives on. Since RAM is so cheap these days, there's no excuse not to have at least a gig of it in a development box. It makes rebooting the virtual machine (which happens a lot) a bearable process.

If you need to work with hardware, you can build yourself a test platform for around $300 now, including a cheap monitor - unless you need exotic hardware.

My experience kernel hacking is in on the VFS level, inserting and modifying a few core routines to report through a /proc interface ... and it was pretty easy to get into. I started with a basic understanding of how things work (inodes, etc.), and it came pretty easily. If you're going to be working on file systems, make periodic copies (backups) of your virtual drive image (if you're using VMWare/Bochs) ... it's a life saver for the first few weeks. :)

The kernel is complex, but so is any major piece of software. Thankfully, lots of bits in the kernel are well engineered and compartmentalized, so chances are you won't have to worry about screwing up the TCP stack if you're in the midst of inode.c ...

have fun!

It also means that when you screw things up (if you don't, I'd be surprised; I bet even Alan Cox screws up now and again), you won't lose anything. And don't give me anything about ext3; if you screw up enough in the wrong place, your filesystem is hosed.

I think VMWare does the same thing (Their current version is 3.0, but you can download 2.0 without paying for it, last time I checked). Also not open source (obviously).

You raise some very good points but I think that you are looking too specifically at the OS, and not seeing the broad picture. Indeed, you are right, people want money, that is why we work. However, who is to say that commercial, even (eghad!) closed-source projects will never make it to linux? Oh, wait, they already have..
The notion of other applications -- ones that people pay for -- is what (IMHO) drives many of we "linux zealots" to say Windbloze sucks! Use Linux, it r0x0r5!
Stay with me, you'll soon understand...

If we get people to migrate to linux, and by people I mean a LOT of people (like half the desktop market share) then the people that develop games, the people that develop office apps, screensavers, etc etc etc and insert your own windows-like app -- will develop these apps for linux.

That is what drives us. That is why we want the global domination. Not for status, but for the recognition that, yes, Veronica there IS another OS, and YES there ARE apps for it and most importanly, There are companies that pay hackers to develop apps for it
The kernel will forever be free, because linux is the kernel. And anything else will stay free because of the GPL, but new apps don't have to adapt to the GPL if they don't want to.

> Would you like to be able to run two Linuxes simultaneously on the same box?

VMWARE has been doing this for years, on Intel architeture. Plus, you can run multiple operating systems, not only Linux. It creates a virtual machine, so it runs in protected mode, has a completely independent BIOS, uses the memory you assign... Works like a breeze.

I frequently run Win 2000 AND Debian Linux AND Win 98 (this one for some testing purposes), at the very same time. So you can have the best of all worlds.

You'd have to get fancy to get past 26 drive letters though,

Besides, who on earth would want more than 26 block devices? [Uh, maybe the same folks who would want more than 640k of RAM? Naaah.]

So now, as then, if you want something out of the ordinary (i.e., something useful) don't use Micro$soft products. I think the suggestion of using Samba on Linux under VMWare to serve the ISO images to the host W2K box is your best bet.

vmware?

Get it Here,, plus if your are concerned about Windows only get a copy of VmWare trial license its good for 30days. Last you can get a Window 30days trial at CompUSA etc so you should be all set until Xmas.

what about vmware ?

By the way there was a benchmark of Linux kernel compilation done under... Win2000.

(BTW, you should lose the <br> tags that break your post a third of the way across the window...they're hella annoying.)

MOL is more like VMWare, but is very similar to classic, yes.

> Why not let the schools decide what would be best for their kids to learn? I think it will look bad for the OSS community to force schools to use OSS. Maybe a 50/50 split

Are you proposing that we get VMware invloved also?

;)