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Actually, VM is a complete OS, with tools, editor, compilers and applications deisgned specifically for it.

Is that for the component that actually implements the virtual machines, or for the OSes that run on the virtual machines, e.g. CMS (was CMS ever capable of booting as a single-user OS on a "raw" S/3x0?), or the regular IBM OSes (or non-IBM OSes, as per the topic of this thread...) that can also run as guests in a virtual machine?

Actually, what do you think, would it be possible to port VM to anything non-mainframe? (a PC, for example?)

As VM implements a virtual, err, umm, S/3x0, complete with channel controllers, simulated mainframe-flavored disks, etc., and, I think, depends on features of S/3x0 to provide that emulation, it probably couldn't be ported at all easily.

However, VMware implements a similar type of "virtual machine" on NT or Linux on a PC. (The posts asking whether VM was like VMware were somewhat amusing, given that VM/3x0 and CP/360 antedated the 8086, much less VMware, by many years, as in "probably around 15 years, if not more".)

No problem. Get VMware and run Linux under NT (or run WinXX under Linux, as I do).

This LinuxLite may just be the next big thing - who, at this point, can really tell?

It's more than obvious that LinuxOne is, well, dubious at best. There are already a number of very good distros for the WinXX crowd. This one really does look like a "get ritch quick" scheme.

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VMWare for Linux does, of course, exist.

Eh? The non-commercial version is now priced at US$99. The commercial version, incidentally, is US$299. I'd love to be able to use it at work, but I can't get approval at that price... Sigh.

Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty

I haven't tried quickbooks under wine, but I run it just fine and dandy with VMware.
Joseph Elwell.

Sure it would. Its callef VMWare. The important question is why?

i know developers who run sql navigator or TOAD
inside VMWare emulations. This works quite good!

One free alternative would be to write some custom scripts in Perl using the excellent CGI and DBI modules along with modperl for apache. I just cobbled together something for my site in ~2 nights that allows me to display contents of tables, delete entries and edit and update entries. Not too much work and kinda fun. Another alternative would be to buy vmware and run NT on top of Linux so that you could use NT Oracle tools. I have been using VMWare for a few months now, and if your computer is hefty enough (>=P2 233, >=96MB RAM) it runs NT (and all Win32 apps) quite well.

In fact it's quite simple to run Linux under Windoze (at least, Windows NT 4.0), and vice versa -- simply install VMWare. It's easy to install, seems stable and provides most of the functionality needed for both platforms. I even persuaded my boss to install Corel Linux on his NT machine once he saw how easy it was!
-- Paul Gillingwater

From any computer system I run. This is just totally fscking insane. I am in complete shock. I'm going to go out and buy a copy of vmware to keep microsoft where it belongs.

Basically you would install a FreeBSD/Linux distribution in your VM, which would be used as the server.

With your host Linux machine, you'll use masquerade/ipchains or bridging so that your virtual machine would never be able to send or receive a single packet on your ethernet network, except going to your router. You'll also arrange that the communication between your host and your guest OS is only done with TCP/IP in the direction host -> guest.

That way the external machines should be relatively safe from crackers. Once your installation is done, you'll just copy the image (or the HD partition) each time you boot the VM. If it is compromised, you just have to copy again and reboot the VM.

Now the problem is to access/put data in your VM ; there are several solution:

• Using VMWare on a standalone partition. Basically you have a raw partition image in a file on your Linux host machine, that you mount with loopback, and can change freely. When you're done with your changes you just do a 'cat mypartition.ext2 > /dev/hda4' and run VMWare on /dev/hda4. When you want to access log files you stop the VM and then either copy /dev/hda4 for archival purpose or mount it and retrieve log files for instance, before erasing it the next time. You can have twice the same partition so that you could run VMware, say either on /dev/hda3, /dev/hda4 while you're examining or copying the other partition (you rotate partitions).
• Mounting your guest OS partition in your Linux host. That way you'd be able to change files from your Linux OS. The problem might be that the cracked guest can try to exploit actively bugs in the NFS/samba client of your guest OS, by sending him crap (that's why mounting the partition of a stopped guest OS is more secure ; although you'd need to force an e2fsck first). You must be careful to never execute programs on your guest mounted partition though.
• You can write scripts that wait on some TCP/IP port of your guest, for your host OS (alone) to send a tar archive that they would extract. A similar protocol could be used to retrieve files (or with a networked backup software running in your guest).

Also the ability to run to several VMs on copies of the same partition/image or different images, is the source of a number of fun tricks.

The nice thing about VMware is that once you have set a distribution you are able to copy it everywhere. As crackers don't seem to grow up and as security models of most used systems are staying poor (Unix/Windows), I expect some commercial plug-and-play products "webserver in a virtual machine" to appear for servers that are expected to have a low load.

You should try vmware! I've been running it since 1.0 came out a week and a half ago, and it works great so far. Havn't run any games in it yet, but Office works fine...

It's $75 until July 14 (see their price list ). I'm buying it!

Mine has a couple times in the last few months. I always assumed it was one of vmware's modules since I was actively using that each time. I stopped using vmware and the crashes stopped. But Linus says:

The one major fix in 2.2.8 is the SMP fix for disable_irq(), courtesy of Andrea Arcangeli (I disagreed in details and did it differently in the end, but all the heavy lifting was done by Andrea). This is the thing that caused silenth deaths for some people with certain network adapters (3c509 and 8390-based cards in particular: the latter covers ne2000 clones which are fairly common).

Yep, describes my hardware and what happened exactly. I hope this means I can start using vmware again without fear...

Fortunatly, thanks to VMWare betas/demo versions( www.vmware.com/) most Linux users could try the 2.2.x versions of BSD (FreeBSD 3.x in some latter versions of VMWare). (Would someone have a bootdisk with a kernel with the PCnet drivers so that a network install could be done ?)

Come on Linux users, stop disparaging FreeBSD and the other *BSD, we are all members of a same friendly family.

http://www.vmware.com
--
Michael Dillon - E-mail: michael@memra.com

--L

...and eat it too?

http://www.vmware.com/

Have your M$ and Linux too.

i've still got all those crazy vmware screenshots here. today i served up 5.9 gigs because of a single link from slashdot this morning -- scary. i guess i'll probably have hit 6 when i wake up.

According to the FAQ, Game support in v1.0 is going to be marginal. In particular, DirectX and Joysticks are not supported.

Before we all get too psyched, check out their product info page, where they say

VMware software is based on the company's patent-pending Virtual Platform(tm)....

Virtual machines are patentable? Sounds like a possibly-great product with a marketing/legal department that wants to screw everybody thoroughly.

You can also get the software from www2.vmware.com but most of the links will need to be changed manually to www2 (they point to www.vmware.com)

I submitted this story a couple days ago, but it never got picked up. Anyway...

Head over to VMware and read about their upcoming beta. The software is supposed to allow you to run any ix86 OS under Linux or (*cough*) NT. It's a little pricey ($300), but they're claiming it runs near-native speed. It would certainly remove the need for a Windows or BeOS partition here.