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<sarcasm>
Well, that's not really an option, unless you know something I don't. Since when did M$ port IE to Linux/FreeBSD?
</sarcasm>

VMware is your friend. :-) It's the only way to get a decent web browser (read: IE) running under Linux. (Well, the Win16 flavor of IE might run under Wine, but I've never tried Wine and don't know how well it works. I also need to be able to run pcAnywhere at home, so it's not like I only use VMware for IE.)

This is exactly one of the uses VMWare quotes.

the hardware described would be cool, but i havn't seen anything like it. (unfortunately!)

# cat .sig

Try:
vmware
Plex86
Basilisk

Basically anything that gets you out of X, which is exceptionally primitive, lacking as it does alpha blending, true type fonts, etc., and being useful only for people running software over a network.

I'm not trying to be rude, but if you're going to do graphic design work, you should use a graphics design tool - in other words not X, which is unsuitable - how could you present as work those ugly blocky fonts?

If you want to do anything I recommend a good set of tools - if you're doing cross-country driving I'd recommend a 4 by 4 vehicle - to use a cadillac would be silly, and if you're going to do graphic design work you should use a graphic designer's tool - a Macintosh or Windows.

For one, it's a perfect way to debug web pages. I can start up VMware for Linux and preview the things I work on in Netscape/Linux, Netscape/Win98, and IE5 all at the same time. And when I fix the page, no nasty time wasted rebooting to see that the last fix I made broke the way the page appears in one of the above browsers.

I imagine that an OS in an OS is also useful for isolating viruses and buggy software too. Or would you prefer to try out that nasty new bug that flashes your bios and erases your partition table on your real computer?

I suggest that you check out the VMware site to see their propaganda on the issue. They had some good points the one time I actually read them. Some silly ones too, but that's PR for you.

I've been using VMware to "do the windows work I need to do with the stability of Linux" and I'm thoroughly pleased. USB support + some speed improvements would be great, but all in good time.

I also happen to think the price of a DVD is usually reasonable also.

You think USD$600 is reasonable? Because the DVD people do not support alternative operating systems, the price of a DVD includes the price of VMware (USD$300) plus the price of a halfway decent version of Windows (another USD$300). Anything else either provides shit resolution (DVD players with television outputs) or will get your butt in jail and your equipment confiscated under 17 USC 1201 where applicable (BSD- and Linux-based DVD efforts).

VMWare (see my other reply to you) virtualizes the disk and network too. The host disk is completely safe (as far as I can tell.) A hacked daemon could access the network, but if you're that concerned, you can disable networking in the VM.

You can already run Linux on Windows, using VMWare. I'm running Linux on WinNT4 right now. You can download an eval. They have a $99 hobbyist price, too.

Also, Cygwin provides a good implementation of the GNU tools on Windows, which lets you run GCC and compile and run lots of open source stuff.

You can already run Linux on Windows, using VMWare. I'm running Linux on WinNT4 right now. You can download an eval. They have a $99 hobbyist price, too.

Also, Cygwin provides a good implementation of the GNU tools on Windows, which lets you run GCC and compile and run lots of open source stuff.

At my work, we have a choice of NT, NT, or NT - and it's not native hackable NT either, it's a bizarre mod on NT done by some systems group. I run Red Hat on my PC, then the obligatory corporate NT builde in a VMWare virtual machine. Handed it to the NT drones one day and said "what's wrong with this?" with the NT machine full-screen. They couldn't tell, said it was just fine.

Stuff like this really comes into it's own when you can run multiple 'machines' on one, get a whole multi-OS test lab happening on one box. User-land linux rocks - a great step in the right direction!

Baldur's Gate 2, that is pretty much a given.

Rio 500 MP3 player, which you can pick up for cheap at Audible.com, last time I checked.

A subscription to Wired.

VMWare for the geek in all of us.

A new video card, though I don't know specifics.

I completely agree with you this is a serious problem. Software track what you do what files you handle without telling anything to you .. I recently had an arguments with the ACDSee coders over their "feature" of storing a complete database of everything you saw with their software (complete paths and filenames, togeter with small thumbnails sometimes) and they refused to acknoledge that there might be some users that DONT WANT the whole world to knwo what they have been looking at on their computer.

The solution? the only solution that's 100% safe and simple is to keep an entire machine as a VMWARE file all inside a BESTCRYPT file!

in a SINGLE move get rid of any chanche for any forensic software to snoope into your OS details :-)))) AH.. of course you dont have to keep your DATA into the virual machien.. you can leeave your BESTCRYPT file in the HOST machine and access it via VIRTUAL NETWORK from the VMWARE machine! :)) (on which you must have installed bestcrypt as well). Email me if you want to discuss details more. I am writing some web pages about all this.

• Don't we need a lot of people stomping around and fuming about VMWare being patented software? Shouldn't there be a boycott of it?

yerricde is a troll. On VMware's website, they talk about 'patent-pending technologies', but they are not acually stupid enough to try to patent VMs. Unfortunately, Flash VOS Inc. are that damn stupid. VOS have patented IBM's VM technology from, uh, like the 60s. (great stuff, and still in great use; plus, this is what was used to run 40,000 copies of Linux on a [recursively VM'd :-) ] partition of a IBM S/390)

Flash VOS: can you guys not spell prior art?
Or are you just so atracted to your patent lawyers, you like giving them money for the fun of it?

Nothing to worry about here.

cheers,
G

The two products are in no way comparable.

Interestingly enough, if you look at the product specs for VMWare, Solaris and OS/2 are not listed as supported OSes. I browsed the VMWare newgroups a while ago, and they mentioned that they don't plan on support OS/2 for sure (I don't know what their stance is now).

Who cares?! Go get just about _any_ computer. Do not pay any attention to who makes it (It can be Apple, x86, Alpha, Solaris, etc.)

Install Linux on this computer. (Note - if you're going to be using floppies during the installation, you may want to avoid the Macs, which have moved away from floppy drives!) Now, under Linux, you can run Windows "for real" by using VMware. Then, you can add another product for Linux that emulates MacOS. So you're now running _three_ OS's at once. If you're in the mood for setting new records, there's also a program named XCoPilot, that emulates the PalmPilot.

So the issue is moot - just get Linux. :-)

...............
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name

This confused me so I booted up good ole win98 and... [snip]

Cheers & good luck!

I'm wondering if anyone can comment on the performance of VMware (and the potential performance of plex86 one day). I used Bochs to run Windows 98, and the performance was awful. The specs on my machine are: AMD K6-2 450 MHz, 256 Mb RAM.
----

I've been interested in stuff like this since I first heard about The Freedows Project sometime in 1998. I just think this kind of stuff is fascinating. I used to wonder if it would be possible to simulate the entire hardware platform, instead of just the operating system. Then VMware came out and answered me.

Now we've got a free-software version. Go, GNU, Go!

I currently have VMWare up and running on my system. For those who don't know, VMWare stands for Virtual Machine Ware. From what I've gathered about Plex86, it does the same thing as VMWare, which is create a virtual machine that runs like a separate machine. It really is quite interesting software.

The difference I can see, however, is that VMWare is already developed and is already costly. For the student version (which is usually substantially cheaper) it costs $99. And for Joe Student, $99 is a whole lot. However, the technology is already advanced such that under my Linux box I have had Win98 running (for apps that just don't work under Wine). If you get the chance VMWare is avalable for a 30 day demo, which I highly recommend.

--

Why dosen't Saint Linus build a machine code module, tacked on to the main linux kernel that emulates another pentium, a virtual pentium if you like. I know you can emulate other kinds of cpu with m/code why not another pentium.

This is similar to what VMWare does. VMWare takes the existing resources on a computer running either Windows or Linux and emulates another PC, which can run whatever OS you want it to run.


=================================

Go have a look at the SETI@Home Downloads page. Tell me there are no processors in there that might have vector-optimised maths units.

Go have a look at the Crusoe Technology page, or the VMWare site. Tell me that it's impossible to use hardware or software to emulate or translate from one instruction set to another. Besides, what's stopping the KrosnoConv "surplus military" stock being military-spec MIPS or SPARC clones? I didn't read the "about the company" bit, so I expected this was just an American company picking up after the excesses of the United States war machine.

Heck, check any Pentium III and tell me that it's impossible to execute another device's instruction set (8088) natively.

The only points that concerned me about the KrosnoConv boards were the Linux-in-Flash claim, and 32Mb of RAM per processor for less than $US200 (either very slow memory, or only 32Mbit perhaps, co-packaged RAM from the old 8086 days). There are projects out there to put Linux in a PC BIOS, or even an LS120. You can get CompactFlash cards, which behave like very small hard drives (either Flash memory pretending to be an IDE drives, or IBM microdrives really being IDE drives). But they're not cheap.

x86 is not the only architecture that SETI@Home supports. Why shouldn't someone produce an add-in card that uses your existing infrastructure? I would still be interested in getting a (cheap!) board full of heavy-maths processors to do hardware encryption for Virtual Private Networks, or even just a heavy duty key server.

I've already got the expensive bits like hard drives, network cards, monitors, cases and memory. I'd actually love to have a "parasitic" processor running its own OS, where I can download software to it, and have it process data that I store for it in my real RAM. Kinda like a multi-processor machine, where one or more processors are especially suited to encryption math.

Don't just spout "that's not how things work". Because with the introduction of technology like that used in the Crusoe, or even older technology like that used in VMWare, or any C64 emulator, you know this is how things work now.

With the risk of getting of topic: There is a software package called vmware that enables to boot windows from a linux window(or prompt).

Well, I haven't seen D3 in the bargin bins, and D2 is still available. I bought D2 ($6.95, CD only) a couple days ago, since it works under Linux using the Descent 2 port.

The bargain version did require you to install it under DOS to extract the data files, though there may be an easy way around this. (I didn't bother...VMWare is ideal for this kind of thing.)

And as a designer, getting pages to look right in both IE and NS while trying to remain W3C 100% valid is a nightmare.

I just went through this with the conversion of a customer's website. Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.

I downloaded and printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and went to town over the weekend, redesigning the site with standards compliance in mind. It looked pretty good in IE 4, IE 5, Mozilla M16, and even Lynx...but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information. I ended up rejiggering the makefile for the site and cobbling together some awk and sed scripts to convert the entire site from a style-sheet-based, standards-compliant design to a table-based design that Netscrape would display acceptably. Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.

(If you want to check out my handiwork, it's at http://www.thejewelers.com. You can also use this link to go straight to the standards-compliant site or this link to go to the lobotomized site. It's not 100% where I want it (no robot food, for instance), but it duplicates the original site's look and feel in a more standards-compliant (and faster-loading, too) way.) All this is just one more reason why I use Internet Explorer, even under Linux (thank $DEITY for VMware...). Say what you want about Microsoft, but they did a much better job of sticking to standards than Netscape.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

Ok first the quick history. Micro$oft sells Xenix to SCO. As part of the contract agreement of sales Micro$oft COULD NOT produce or distribute ANY form of a Unix operating system as long as SCO was in business. (Fact). This is why when NT came out it was touted as "better than Unix". Because M$ couldn't release a Unix flavor. This is why They haven't released their own flavor of M$ LInux. Legally until SCO goes under they CAN'T.
Now here is the thought. What if M$ bought up SCO? Basically buying back Xenix plus some. At that point they contract with SCo is null and void. They (M$) would be free to release a Unix flavor. Now just think about the ramifications of this.
We all know that the bulk of the people that do as BG and the Redmond campus say is because they are Lemmings and/or sheep. Thus to severly damage the growing momentum of Linux they release a M$ Linux that is a total piece of cr*p. Then they could ocme out and in the press say "see how bad Linux is" "we tried to put out a version, but Linux is just not viable." Or somthing to this effect.
How many know that M$ just dumped some money into VMWare and signed in with an OEM agreement with them. This could also throw a wrench into Linux. M$ say starts distributing VMWare with Windows and touting if you want to run Linux you can do it through Windows now.
I think you all can think of the other endless possibilities M$ could do.

They could teach a thing or two to the Wine and VMware people. MAME's success in emulating the most oddball hardware/software configurations imaginable is nothing short of heroic. And yes, you guessed it, I'm an early-80's arcade nut. :)


"Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating." --Richard Stallman

Agreed. VMware does this, and I gladly gave them $$ for the product they made. No paper invoice, no packaging, all electronic. I heard about the product by word of mouth, tried the full-featured -- but time limited -- "demo", and just couldn't not give them money. :/

I can't wait to see if it's going to run under VMWare!

I played with the bootable image they made available free awhile back, but balked at paying hundreds for the manuals. Now the source--life is good!

Use a system like VMware, but with just a simple shared windowing system for the 'boot' OS, you could run windows, linux, MacOS, BeOS, and what have you at the same time, without one being a 'dominant' OS.

Of course, the real beauty comes when you can download the instruction set for Playstation, PS2, Dreamcast, TiVo, or any other embedded system you care to and service all your computing needs with one box.

Well, two if you count the handheld version with PalmOS, NewtonOS, LinuxCE, WAPOS, NokiaOS, etc.

Suddenly the application is the OS...

Kevin Fox

So how about some quality printer drivers?

I agree wholeheartedly. I have an old IBM 4019 printer which I cannot get to print properly in Linux, but it works out of the box perfectly in Win2000. I run VMWare and print from the virtual machine to /dev/lpt0 whenver I need to print a web page or document. I think it is ridiculous that there are only about 30 different drivers for printers when I use the control panel. Hopefully, I will learn to do a bit of programming some day to help fix this.

Do not reboot. Use VMWare.

ObLink: www.vmware.com

Plug for VMware: If you haven't even wanted to try VMware, you're not a geek! If you are boycotting it because it's closed source, get a grip! The licence is free (as in beer), lasts 30 days, so taking a look won't hurt you. There's very little that it won't run, and it's well worth the $100/$300 fee (non-commercial/commercial).

Quicken runs extremely well and you can't beat using Linux' underlying networking for the online banking features. The only thing that's really slow is backing data up to floppy.

Michael J.

VMware has figured out how to get around the aspects of the x86 architecture that don't virtualize properly. If Dosemu could do those same tricks, that would be truly cool.

Of course, there is the FreeMWare project, which aims to do just that. From a brief look, it seems that they have to scan the instructions before execution to find instructions that have to be emulated.

That's why you run Linux from w/in VMware . That way you get the best out of a simulator, and a real OS.

A couple of years ago, what you said was true, but I know a lot of school have switched to the VMware/Linux combo recently because it offers many advantages. I do believe that off the VMware site, somewhere, they have some links to schools that use their software (CU in NY for example).

I have a fairly simple machine, PII 333 with two 4gig harddrives. I have it dual booted with Linux (Redhat 6.0) and NT 4.0 with LILO being the bootloader.

Here's the interesting part: when I boot under NT I can use VMWare to get at the raw Linux partition, and when I boot under Linux I can use VMWare to get to the raw NT partition. Each OS has a specific configuration depending on whether it's a guest or host (using Hardware Profiles under NT and VMWare's dualconf under Linux).

Then it starts getting complex with host-only networking under VMWare for each environment. I actually have 5 different IPs for my one machine:

192.168.0.2: Native (host) NT or native Linux
192.168.101.1: VMNet Bridge
192.168.101.2: NT host/Linux host
192.168.101.3: Linux guest
192.168.101.4: NT guest

So while I have NT as a host, I can use samba to send files to Linux and then test them out. As far as development goes on NT, I have Visual Studio 6.0, Borland's free compiler, and Cygnus's cygwin (with mingw32 built under cygwin). I also have cross tools under cygwin that target Linux and MSDOS (djgpp).

When I use Linux as a host (99.5% of the time), again I can use samba to send executables to the NT guest and try them out *immediately* after compilation. This is a plus for libraries such as SDL, etc. I use pgcc-2.95.2 targetted to mingw32, cygwin (for the hell of it), ms-dos, and Sony PlayStation.

The main reason I use this setup is for hardware/processor feasibility, I have a TNT2 Ultra that isn't supported in any way under VMWare, therefore booting NT means I get 3DSMax, etc. that takes full advantatge of my hardware. Also, I have an ISA card that talks to my PlayStation, and the majority of dev-tools (with the major exception of psxdev) for the PSX are Win32 only (VMWare can't handle non-standard hardware).

How I set this up:

Install NT on the second harddrive

Configure all drivers, etc. for NT (might want to wait for this step to make creating Hardware Profiles easier)

Install Linux on the first harddrive w/ LILO

Setup VMWare on Linux to talk to NT as a guest (using raw disk partitions)

Boot *NATIVELY* into NT and copy your existing profile into a new Hardware Profile (System Control Panel)

Disable any devices in your new profile (call it "Virtual Machine") that VMWare doesn't support (Devices Control Panel)

At this point if you want you can setup VMWare for NT to access Linux as a raw partition

Boot into Linux and test your NT under VMWare, if some drivers fail, disable them under the Devices Control Panel

If you installed VMWare for NT, tweak your Linux dualconf configuration (I had to manually add a condition for switching the links to the X server)

Setup Host-only networking, samba, etc.

I know I didn't go into any detail, I don't have the time to write everything out and I'm not at my machine so I might have missed something. I'll post a couple articles at my site, etc. when I have some time (this weekend?).

Marcus

Cute article. But what's it say? It says that the mainframe hardware is capable of fooling the Linux kernel into thinking it's in charge. Hear of this anywhere else? Yup. VMWare.

Now before you fire up your flamethrowers, think about it... The S/390 hardware was designed to hide itself from whatever it was running, which is exactly why it works as well as it does. Hell Microsoft could port NT5/Win2k/whatever to this platform. So could Be. So could OS/2. (Does OS/2 have a port to the S/390 already?) Linux isn't doing anything new or special here, it's just another virtual OS to the hardware.

I'm a huge Linux advocate, but this little excursion into mainframe land by Linux proves very little. What is the point of running a hundred (or 41400 I think the number was) concurrent Linux sessions when Linux is already multuser and multitasking? Clustering? High availability? No, because you can get all that with the existing mainframe architecture. Running Linux apps on Big Iron? Perhaps, but wouldn't it be better to port Apache, etc. to the mainframe OS and run it on a system that perhaps knows a little bit more about the hardware?

I guess it'd be neat to run a bunch of linux sessions on a mainframe to test a new clustering architecture/algorithm but after the test, there's not much use for it, AFAICT. The Linux/390 project doesn't do much but add to the "cool" factor of Linux, which isn't really all that bad. :-)

If you have 5 users who may need to access windows at the same time, you need 5 windows boxes to connect to using VNC. You could not get by with 1 "VNC Server" machine to serve separate windows desktops to multiple users at the same time.

An interesting implementation I would like to see would be a Linux box using VMWare to 'spawn' windows machines as people needed them and dynamically assign them out VNC requestors.

VMware Beta 2.0 has support for OS/2 as a client.

The only thing I'm concerned about is this:

Note: Support of OS/2 as a guest operating system in this release is experimental and does not represent a commitment by VMware to deliver any future commercial versions of its software supporting OS/2. This experimental functionality is being provided in response to customer requests and in order for VMware to learn more about OS/2 technical and market requirements.

If VMware for Linux will support OS/2 as a client(in a non-beta release), then I'll buy it and use Linux as a base OS. Without OS/2 support I won't buy it and I'll only dabble with Linux. I've too much invested in OS/2 software to throw it all away. Ideally, VMware for OS/2 would exist, but I won't hold my breath, and I refuse to buy Windows software. As such, a Linux version with OS/2 support would be acceptable :-)

An example. As part of our new marketing program (internally named We're-Linux-savvy-month), all our receptionists are now running Linux (RedHat) on any machines which are potentially visible to our clients.

Fair enough you might say. But there is a big problem. Because all our documents are in Micro$oft Word format. (The marketer in me thinks this is priceless, the NT administrator part of me thinks its fine too, but the opportunist in me sees a problem).

So what to do about it ? We cannot afford to be seen as non-Linux-savvy by our clients. So I am forced to go and pay for several copies of VMWare simply to allow our receptionists to continue working. Meanwhile they're whining because it's one more step for them to learn. And we end up paying 3 times, Microsoft, RedHat AND VMware. All this just so some coked up know nothing advertising executives can see how Linux-savvy we are. What a joke.

Still it seems like the people that matter in the organization are finally starting to realise that Linux = $$$$$$$$$$$$$.

I just hope our marketing agency has not missed the boat.

Surf within VMware with no personal info on file...then it doesn't matter (see VMware for Linux).

I was brainstorming around this general idea a while ago. The general problems I came up with were:

• Security of the host system.
• Authentication of the client application.
• Criteria for determining "worthy" projects.
• Billing, accounting, or payment tie-ins.

First off, distributed computing is very successful in some closed environments -- POW (pile of workstation) clusters in campus environments are common. A friend at a New Zealand biotech firm distributes Linux boot floppies. At the end of the "work" day, their Windows boxes are rebooted with this floppy installed, a Linux machine springs into place, and a gene sequencing client starts munching away -- the real work day. Similar schemes are pretty common.

In a broader environment with less control the problem becomes tougher. The host machine needs to have some guarantee of security. The client should also be reasonably secure and non-spoofable. There needs to be authentication.

In order to select for worthy (or billable) projects, some sort of voting scheme needs to b e implemented. If this is based on dollars or bill-backs, the small size of the individual contributions, with per-month CPU rental rates rating < $20 for new equipment (essentially the lease cost for hardware) -- means that this is not a way to get rich.

Factor in latency, bandwidth, lossage, and storage factors. It's a complicated problem.

This isn't to say it's not addressable. Distributed Net appears to be actively researching several of these areas. It's quite possible that all that idle CPU time will one day be put to use. But not real soon now.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

You could have used VMWare to do this, using their transactional filesystem. It avoids the modification issue. An individual session can mess around as much as it likes. When the session is finished, the virtual disk reverts to the origitnal config. It runs under NT I belive. OTOH it costs $$'s.

Run NT under vmware until you can finish the transition =) DevStudio, Outlook, IE, etc. all seem to behave. (The only drawback is a lack of DirectX support inside vmware.)

The built-in modem in my Inspiron 7500 laptop is a winmodem - a Lucent model if I am not mistaken.

Apparently there is a "Linmodem" driver available for the Lucent Winmodem in Inspiron 7500s, see the Winmodems are not modems page..

I *have not* tried this yet, but I have high hopes that I won't have to shell out for a PCMCIA modem (and use up a slot)! I would love to hear from anyone who has tried this driver, particularly on a Dell Inspiron laptop.

It's great to see Dell selling Linux on Inspiron 7500s, but some of us (most of us?) need Windows too. I didn't see a dual-boot (or better yet, VMware configuration for sale...

What is a mainframe from the point of view of linux? What sort of changes are required to port to a mainframe, particularly to a S390? Folks talk about stuff like IO channels and VMs but what are the salient features that I don't know about?

I/O channels: at least on System/3x0, I/O is done by constructing a "channel program", which is a series of commands whose opcodes tell the channel, and the peripheral attached to it, to perform some operation (read data, write data, search a disk track for a block whose "key" has a certain value, rewind a tape, etc.) - there's also a branch instruction (Transfer in Channel) and, as I remember, some ability to do conditional skips over channel commands. The CPU just issues instructions such as "start I/O" to start a channel program; the channel program does the data transfer.

VMs: one "meta-OS" running on S/3x0 mainframes provides, to the OSes running atop it, a "virtual machine", that looks much like a real S/3x0, and whose disks might be subpartitions of the real machine's disks, whose communications controllers might be part or all of the real machine's communications controllers, whose system console might be the terminal on which the operator of that virtual machine is logged in, etc.. (VMware is somewhat like this.) Linux could run on one of those "virtual machines", and one of the other OSes for S/3x0 could run in another one, so that you can run applications for Linux and applications for, say, OS/390 on the same machine, without having to port a UNIX application from Linux to OS/390 (which has a UNIX environment - but it's not completely like the UNIX environment to which most UNIX programmers might be used, e.g. it doesn't use ASCII as its native character set, it uses IBM's EBCDIC).

Assuming I'm familiar with von Neuman architecures, stack machines, microprocessors, minicomputers, memory mapped memory, memory mapped devices, IO ports, interrupts, and the unix concepts of streams, char devices, block devices, etc... what don't I know about mainframes?

Well, IBM mainframes have a fairly conventional von Neumann-architecture instruction set (CISC, 16 32-bit general-purpose registers, variable-length instructions, memory-to-memory character/decimal arithmetic instructions, memory-to-register and register-to-register binary arithmetic instructions) with some specialized add-ons. The CPUs in them are, these days, microprocessors implementing that instruction set.

I don't know if OS/390 implements memory-mapped files, but the hardware certainly permits it - it has a fairly convention in-memory-page-table MMU.

I/O devices aren't memory-mapped, however; you tell them to do things by telling a channel to send them commands. The channel program can interrupt the CPU either to say that it's finished or, as I remember, to notify it that it's reached a certain point in the program.

The UNIX I/O model isn't what OS/3x0 has traditionally implemented, although the UNIX environment atop it implements that, and a Linux port would implement such an I/O model.

One thing I *do* know from using them briefly, is that IBM "terminals" (3270s? something like that) are really weird: they are not simply connected via a serial cable. They have these extra control signals that light up indicators that say "you can't type now, I'm busy" and the text editors seem to do their editing on the "screen" locally and then send the changes back when you are done. I realize this has nothing to do with the kernel, but it would seem to make the whole experience quite surreal.

How surreal was your experience posting your article? You presumably filled in the text in the "Comment" box, doing any editing locally, and then sent the changes to Slashdot's server when you were done by pressing the "Submit" button.

I remember, several years ago, reading some magazine in which somebody described much of the Web as "3270 for the '90's". A lot of the stuff with HTML forms and HTTP POST operations resembles the way I think 3270's work.

The instruction set and I/O architecture of S/390 is described by ESA/390 Principles of Operation. Links to that and some other manuals can be found on the Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture page.

What you want is called Rawdisk support. It is well documented by Vmware on their website and often discussed in their newsgroups. Take a look at the following sites for the specifics on how to set it up. I have used Rawdisks from the start since back in April when the beta's were released.

http://www.vmware.com/support/rawdevi ces.html

news://news.vmware.com