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Plex86 Boots Linux In Normal Mode
Kevin Lawton writes: "Plex86 just reached the
'Linux squared'
state. I just got plex86 running on a Linux Mandrake 7.1 host,
to boot an old RedHat 5.0 disk image file (installed with bochs
some time ago). CVS updates coming in the next few days. Next on the chopping block are the MS Windows OSen!
"
Does it
Support printers?
Support audio devices?
Support video modes other than text?
Provide graphical configuration?
Support accelerated display via DGA?
Support floppy drives?
Support ip through the host's adaptor?
Support serial ports
Support fullscreen mode.
Of course it doesn't. Vmware does all these things today. Not a year from now, or two years. Not just on linux. Buy a copy of vmware. They deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software.
And no, I don't work for them
I still rememeber how, some years ago, OS/2 decided to overcome Windows. Unfortunately M$ did a smart move in time, by launching Win95. Most of OS/2 Windows emulation was based on 16 bit Windows. Besides, the mixed nature of Win95 (it has both 16/32 bit code) and its weird integration/embedding, made the transfer of Win32 code to OS/2 a nearly impossible task. During the years, it seems that IBM tried several times to recover from this blow. However M$ managed to smartly maneuver and avoid the danger. First by forcing IBM to accept its supermacy on market. Second by smartly destroing those who could help IBM to move OS/2 forward.
Today the situation is pretty different. First people don't wanna move from a classic Win32 basis, that has established deep roots. Most people use, for years, Win98/NT. Some have transferred to Win00, but this OS looks more as a continuation of old NT traditions. So, improvements are more superfluous than useful. The only good thing is that it is stable for a larger field of activies than Win98/NT.
In the mean time I have seen that M$ customers became quite conservative. The new great WinMe looks as the biggest M$ fiasco since th ill-famous DOS 4.0. Apart from this, we have to note that M$ does not promise any inovations in the short future.
Right now the Linux front presents three great achievements:
VMWare is working stable and fast on Linux.
Recently Wine started to launch such important apps like Word00 & Excel00
Now Plex86 seems set forward to start implementing Windows emulation on Linux
If nothing changes, than soon we may face the fact that te last M$ bastion will fall. If M$ does not have in its hat a new rabbit or a new OS implementation then it will surely loose ground. First by those who don't need anymore "two OS's in one hardware". Second becaudse many average users will be able to launch M$ soft on linux.
So time to start counting backwards...
What it does explain is why VMware doesn't run on the Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, etc.
If you run Bochs on another processor, you should be able to run VMware or Plex86 on that.
Oh dear.
Green Monkey
If the VM is really emulating the hardware, why have seperate support or debugging stages for different OSes? Why does it matter what software it runs; if it emulates the architecture 100% then it should run anything that would run on the architecture.
I suppose the two reasons I could think of are undocumented interfaces, and bugs in the software that make assumptions about bugs in the hardware. The console emulator's problem is pretty much explained by lack of documentation (most info is reverse-engineered) but on a fairly standard system like x86, why all the fuss?
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2