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VMware vs Virtual PC vs Bochs
Sean writes "Possibly of great interest to developers as well as alternative OS users, this article compares three x86 emulators, VMWare, VirtualPC and Bochs. It looks like VMWare is better than the lot, but Bochs is shaping up nicely too."
Okay, I think this would be obvious, but maybe it isn't to most people. Why would you compare the OS emulators to other emulators? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the emulator to the actual OS in which it is attempting to emulate?
Bochs has come a long way since I first used it in '98. From what I see now, it has a lot of potential. It just needs a better interface, and some quirks to be worked out.
Bochs and VMWare are completely different animals. Comparing their relative performances is simply nonsensical. From the bochs site:
Bochs is a highly portable free IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++,
that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86
CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS.
On the other hand, VMWare is a virtual machine implementation. Whilst Bochs can mimic an Intel processor on any platform to which it's ported, VMWare depends on being able to pass machine code directly to the native CPU without interpreting it, and therefore its performace is pretty snappy.
At least you can say appples and oranges are both round, but this 'review' takes the biscuit. Bochs will never "shape up nicely" in the way that the article expects it to because it's a fundamentally different piece of software to VMWare. Plex86 (formerly FreeMWare), founded by the lead developer of Bochs, would have been the Open Source analogy for VMWare, had its development not died off several months ago due to a terminal lack of developer interest.
You'll note that he's using it on a dual celeron 533, which isn't exactally the speediest thing out there. Also, jsut to state the obvious, this means he's running this on x86, which isn't where most of VirtualPC's user base is.
Mod point free since 2001
Of my Amiga 3000 in 1990, with a 386 BridgeBoard and an Emplant card, with these two cards I was able to run PC software in a window on my Amiga Workbench, AND have a Macintosh running in its own screen behind the Workbench.
Of course, we had to pirate the Mac roms to get the Emplant going. But it was a nice system.
It's fun to be 12 years ahead of your time.
moderate me down if I'm wrong, but hasn't bochs development slowed down in favor of plex86, which does virtualization instead of emulation? [although being fired from Madrake probably didn't encourage Kevin Lawton [?]].
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
He's comparing three completely different products as if they were similar.
I took a class last fall that required us to do some fairly intrusive kernel hacking in Linux using VMWare. It served that purpose fairly well; it was nice to be able to accidently fsck up your entire filesystem (no pun intended) without having to worry about losing your work. The only problem we had was that it absolutely refused to maintain the correct time.
I also used it when I was messing with Linux From Scratch, so I could see how it worked before trying to install it on actual hardware. That's what I still use VMWare for; doing test runs of risky software.
VirtualPC is a Macintosh program for people who need to run the occasional Windoze program. I don't know why they even bothered with a PC version. I also don't know why they compare it to VMWare.
I'm not familiar with Bochs, but it sounds to me like several layers of abstraction on the VMWare model. So of course it's slow. That's what layers of abstraction do!
So I'm not quite sure what the point of this article was. Someone want to fill me in?
Am I the only one confused as to why this review is comparing an OS emulator to these other emulators?
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait, he does.
I don't believe these emulators take advantage of multiple CPU's, so he is using effectively a 533mhz Celeron. That's a little slow for these emulators.
He states that neither supports sound cards. This is not correct. VPC has the edge for this function in my opinion, although VMWare isn't bad.
Here's what I've learned. Virtual PC is your best bet for running virual Windows based machines. It runs them very well. On the other hand, I can't get any distro of Linux to fully load under VPC. That's not saying you can't, but each one crashes or freezes at some point. The real strength of VPC is that it emulates known, common hardware, so it provides an easier environment to set up in the emulated machine.
By contrast, VMWare is mediocre at providing an environment for Windows. It will do it, but the non-standard video card it emulates is a huge pain in the rear. However, VMWare runs Linux distro's pretty well. It emulates different types of hardware, and the options are impressive.
I wouldn't rate one better than the other, they're both very good and some things, and very average to poor at others.
However, you should buy one of these tools for testing out new software. You can load software inside the virtual machine, test it (for trojans, spyware, whatever), and then when you're done, you either blow the changes away or keep them in you virtual machine. The virutal disks themselves are disk files, so they provide an excellent testing environment because they are effectively immune from user changes to the environment (burn the hard drive image to a CD, and pass it out to the testers with VPC on their drive). It allows you to test on dozens of machines without owning dozens of machines.
Its cool stuff.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Yes, and this and this screenshot both exemplify the rocket-powered progress that plex86 has undergone, placing it well ahead of Bochs.
Hey, why didn't he include some 31337 NES emulators in his review?
We all know the desire to play Super Mario Brothers on a PC was the inspiration for all this.
If you're going to use VMWare (I do, have since 1.0, and it's great), here are some tips to keep in mind:
- when asked about the graphics card during a Linux install, say SVGA generic, later on you'll upgrade it to the VMWare video card when you install the VMWare tools.
- specify "Undoable" for your disk(s) if you ever want to run a bunch of odd tests, installing weird things for example, or trying a virus to see what it does, then just say "forget it" when you're done. If you're doing a virus test please do remember to turn off the network connection though...
- If you've used VMWare 1.x or 2.x but not tried 3.x, it's a whole new world. The mouse responds like it's a real system - even on my slower machine (dual PII-400's). 3.0 is a major leap forward.
- Have lots of memory in the host system, remember running two OS's means you'll be using a lot more RAM.
- Sound is a weak point currently, you can get it pretty good but not great. Using the preempt kernel patch on 2.4.17 helps but isn't quite enough. Playing around with priorities helps too.
Got Wisdom?
What happened to http://www.netraverse.com win4lin? I havn't used VMWare in about a year, but about a year ago I compared the usability of vmware and win4lin.
Win4lin is quite impressive, and quite stable. Win4lin apparently took a number of "shortcuts" and broke some rules, which VMWare did not. Making VMWare's product more universal, and flexible. Win4lin *only* supports win98, and cannot boot any other operating system. Win4lin needs serious kernel patches aswell. VMWare can run under linux, and boot linux, win4lin cannot. VMWare is also available under windows.
Although I generally tend to side with designs which are more flexible and portable, the performance and responsiveness of win4lin are quite impressive. As a user, win4lin has been what's been running on my desktop for over a year Weather win4lin will be able to "adapt" their product to run winXP or 2000, remains to be seen; I don't know how much they're tied directly to win98. I have recently heard that they have a version of of win4lin which can run WinME, which is very simular to win98.
VPC on x86 seems kind of pointless... why dink around with software emulation to run multiple OSes when you can just get one of those removable HD bays and swap actual hard drives in and out with different OSes on them?
If you're a Mac user, though, VPC is pretty sweet. Newer OSes aren't blazing fast on it, but they're acceptable-- it's probably the best way to test out 'risky' software, because you can make a backup copy of the HD image in no time.
The best use I've found for it currently, though, is as a lightweight Terminal Services client on my iBook... using Windows for Workgroups, a TCP/IP stack for Win 3.11 and the 16-bit version of Microsoft's Terminal Services client software. All of this fits in a 100MB HD image with a ridiculous amount of room to spare-- I just haven't had the time to transfer it all to a smaller one. It's also blazing fast. The Virtual PC boots up from the virtual POST to a Windows desktop in under a minute, and recovers from a saved state in less than half that time.
~Philly
- I've been playing DOS games (under PC-DOS). Settlers II and Ultima Underworld I/II play perfectly. Populous is unplayably fast. Tomb Raider was reasonably fast though it did keep stopping for a while every 10 seconds.
- Playing games under Windows 98 is tricky. Age of Empires II and Red Alert play. They're a little slow but not so slow you can't play.
- I installed Debian with no problem. In some tests the emulated X server is faster than the Native XDarwin. (I'm serious! XDarwin sucks and I guess the there's no reason for the emulated S3 card to be that slow.) Couldn't get networking to work. Did some numeric speed tests (eg. echo "2^100000"|time bc) and found the emulated machine to be half the speed of running natively. Really! That dynamic compilation stuff works well sometimes. XGalaga worked fine!
- Also tried FreeBSD (did an FTP install, flawless), Plan 9 (3 or 4 hours to install but it seemed to work) and MenuetOS (pretty nippy).
with success.Goes to show you can emulate the hardware completely and still get good results. Bochs has a long way to go.
-- SIGFPE
Unfortunately, the quirks can be real show stoppers. VMware has the edge in that it actually is a useful environment if you have to occasionally use Windows, and need a bit of performance. As long as VMware sort of works under FreeBSD (yeah, I know, it's official and BSD is dying; nothing to see here, please move on), I'm happy with it.
Bochs is pretty impressive in that it actually works and actually does useful things, but I wouldn't dream of using it for serious work as it stands now. It's just too slow, and plex86 is just too far out.
I did work on Wine way back when and I still like its idea, but portability really is a huge issue.
None of these emulators are at the point where I can start contributing anything useful. The gorgeous thing about Wine is that, once you get it to run at all, you can start addressing things that don't work for you, and work in that area can benefit all the emulators. As things stand now, you're pioneering to get any of them to run Solitaire under FreeBSD, and that just hurts too much to consider scratching.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Considering these virtual/emulated hardware programs are never as fast as the real thing does that mean they would be suitable to play classic PC games that run too fast on modern PCs? Has anyone tried running the classics such as Scorched Earth, Comander Keen, Crystal Caves, Duke Nukem etc under any of these programs, particuarly Bochs which is free. I notice that Bochs even has Soundblaster emulation which would be great for old games. I would be interested to see the results.
aus.music.scrapbook
Also, it's kinda fun to run (a real) XDarwin as a server for a virtual FreeBSD box. Works fine.
-- SIGFPE
Wasn`t there a version of VirtualPC for running RedHat a while ago?
Why doesn`t someone create a clone of em86 for ppc/linux, and possibly run ppc/linux under a virtual machine in OSX (ppc cpu`s are designed to be able to virtualize themselves.. unlike x86)
The whole system would be far more performant if 90% of it were ppc native, and only a small subset of applications which are only available as binaries, were running under emulation, and it would show up a major disadvantage of closed source software.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If "terminal server" (hah! that meant something completely different before MS usurped the term) is your only goal, you may want to try rdesktop under the X emulator under MacOS X. I think it'd be lighter weight.
I use rdesktop to access some corporate goop that only runs on Windoze, and it's gorgeous. Unlike the MS terminal server client, you can even use weird screen resolutions like 700x500 to make apps fit in your host window without scroll bars.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
If you want to play Scorched Earth on a Linux platform, just get xscorch (it's on freshmeat). They've added lots of interesting features (such as Black Rain, which is a Death's Head full of Hot Napalm, and Solar Panels, which recharge your shield a bit each turn).
:)
I know that there are "slowdown" programs available for Win98, because I've seen someone using one to play an old game, but I don't have a name or place for them.
(This reminds me of the time when I was playing Zelda on a DOS Game Boy emulator on a DX-80, and I cheated on a difficult part by turning off Turbo for slow motion
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
One facet of these emulators that is of particular interest to developers, but not mentioned in the article, is the completeness of the emulation. Back when I was working on an OS, I found that there were some instructions that were incompletely/improperly emulated by bochs and plex86. This made it difficult to write some kinds of code.
I am not sure how VMWare compares with regards to this. When I tried it it seemed to be alot more complete than bochs/plex86, but unfortunately it was missing the "console only" mode that plex86/bochs has.
Also I corresponded with VMWare who was unwilling to guarantee that their cheaper "Linux guest only" version would be able to run a simple handcrafted OS. I decided that their much more expensive general version was not worth the price, and stuck with plex86/bochs, working around the improperly emulated, or non-emulated, instructions.
I think it would be interesting to see a comparison of these emulators from a completeness standpoint, not just a performance standpoint. For an OS developer, the former is probably more important than the latter.
In any case, an emulator is a godsend when you are writing OS code, because otherwise you have to reboot your machine and wait for it to POST each time you change you code rather than just simply firing off a much quicker and easier run of the emulator. Also, the emulators often print out useful messages when there is an unusual processor condition or a processor exception, which can be very helpful in tracking down the cause of lockups. Plex86 was particularly good in this regard at the time that I was using it.
What about user-mode-linux?
"User-Mode Linux is a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup.
User-Mode Linux gives you a virtual machine that may have more hardware and software virtual resources than your actual, physical computer. Disk storage for the virtual machine is entirely contained inside a single file on your physical machine. You can assign your virtual machine only the hardware access you want it to have. With properly limited access, nothing you do on the virtual machine can change or damage your real computer, or its software. "
get it at http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net
or apt-get install user-mode-linux
The author says "My PC is a lowly dual Celeron...", but a dual 533 MHz Celeron system is actually faster than a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz system for running VMWare !
Because, on a dual CPU system, the native OS runs on one CPU and the virtualized OS (running inside VMWare) runs on the other CPU.
I say this by experience because I tried the two configurations and was very surprised (even if the Pentium 4 had PC266 memory !).
...unless you talk only about emulators for x86 (the topic wasn't too clear about this.)
For most of the x86 UNIX world, VMWare and Bochs are surely helpful. As a Virtual PC for Mac user, I was dubious about the introduction of VPC for Windows until I realized that trying to install multiple versions of OSes on x86 hardware is a pain in the ass at best. VPC should run very nicely on these systems since the emulation may be less. Unlike VPC/Mac, VPC/Windows shouldn't have to translate the processor instructions from Intel Pentium II to PowerPC G3 instructions, but just shove them at the actual processor.
VPC/Mac has one thing going over its x86 cousins: it truly emulates a PC, not just an environment rich enough for an OS to operate. I'm starting to speak out of the side of my mouth, not having to use VMWare or Bochs, but there's something to be said of emulation of a whole machine on hardware that was not intended to process these kind of instructions.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Don't get me started on the network performance though - I think it emulates a 10Mbit connection, and even that's being generous.
Bochs comes close to the mark but only implements the features of the x86 architecture needed to run specific operating systems. No-one contributes to it, which is a shame, because I can imagine that Bochs could be turned into a cycle accurate simulator with some modern hardware emulations and all the x86 feature set (for example, Superpages were only recently added and are still fundimentally broken). An emulator is the perfect OS debugging tool, it's a shame kernel developers (in particular alternative OS developers) dont embrace it more.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The author cites a recent slashdot poll, "According to this very recent poll, my PC's speed is among the majority of the PCs today." Obviously he didn't read the "This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane. "
people should try to make Cygwin better. If it was just a bit faster & just a bit better polished, why would you need a PC emulator?
I'm using Cygwin all the time (too lazy to reboot)...
I do network app development that requires multiple machines. Using VPC I can run a Netware server, RedHat 7.2, and Win2K on my Win2k laptop at the same time. It is simply the best way when you can't have a lab full of equipment. I also run VPC on my OS X powerbook on occaision. The Mac version can use multiple processors...not sure about the windows version.
I work for Symantec in testing Norton Internet Security products, and we, testers, use it all the time. It's a great product. I used to do Web testing, and it was great for that too. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Why not just run Windows? This way you can cross compile to your hearts content.
The sad part is that x86 self-virtualization is so difficult in the first place. It would be much easier if user-mode accesses to control registers were disallowed. How hard could that be for Intel? Or for AMD?
Several other (less popular architectures) are much easier to virtualize: S/370, M680x0 and PowerPC e.g. Motorola just missed the target with the original 68000 - eight privileged status bits were user-readable. They fixed that in the M68010.
The x86 situation benefits only VMWare, which figured out how to virtualize x86 despite Intel. And VMWare still has trouble; it can handle only specific OSes in guest machines. By contrast VM/370 (or whatever IBM is calling it these days) can handle virtually any guest OS.
Not long ago I tried out VMWARE (they have a free trial period), and I was quite impressed at how well it works. It basically ran every application I threw at it w/o crashing (albeit a tad slow on my 400MHz machine, but that's the price of emulation). The only problem area I had was wtr networking. My Linux box is on a home lan at a 192.168.1.3, and that's the address I also configured when I installed win98 to test this thing. Problem is there were all kinds of conflicts every time my cronjob ran to check various pop accounts... So I know it's not supposed to be setup like that, but I haven't had time to mess with it since then but perhaps someone here knows what the deal is?
VMware merely provides a virtual environment that makes the OS think it is the only OS one the system. The instructions execute on the processor unaltered.
I was doing some testing of Bochs recently to see how well I can expect win95 to perform on my PS2. All I can say is that it's not worth it until the SVGA emulation improves a great deal. I got win95 running ( slowly ) under Bochs and tried playing simtower. Needless to say the SVGA support wasn't there to do that.
I used a x86 P6-2 ( PII ) @ 266Mhz since it has a simalar clock speed for my tests. However remember that PS2 arch is very unfriendly to code written for general purpose arch -- especially when emulated. The short of it: You'll be able to run DOS on PS2, but prob not able to play tie fighter.
I'll post somewhere how the actual PS2 test goes when my US linux kit gets here. I'm very interested in running MSDOS games on PS2. =)
This is a truly wonderful emulator... I actually got Darwin (Intel) booted on it a while ago... aside from a few flaws... it's nearly as good as VPC... and it's non-commercial, too.
would you compare bochs to the others?
Virtual PC & VMWare are virtualizers.. not strict emulators.
Bochs is a true emulator.
There is a whopping huge difference when it comes to performance.
(Bochs will be more accurate, but never come close to the performance of the others)
You can download programs to slow down your games for faster machines. I still play Arena: The Elder Scrolls myself. =)
You should be able to d/l the programs from:
http://www.elderscrolls.net/
I've found that bochs could actually help playing old MSDOS games because of this... if it's SVGA BIOS emualtion was working for these games.
Being able to play DOS games with working audio, specifically the Underworlds, System Shock, and others on VPC on OSX is the holy grail for me.
On games running too fast, is there any chance VPC has speed throttling?
It's definitely a niche product, but it's just the ticket for a Windows refugee for whom WINE doesn't quite cut it. The VNET virtual NIC handles Internet Explorer and Eudora just fine.
One reservation in recommending Win4Lin is that the target market may find installation too difficult. For example, I had to jump through some hoops to make a floppy boot image (I have the non-bootable W98 upgrade CD) for a system without a floppy drive.
Also, you're dependent on NeTraverse keeping the kernel patch up to date. Unless they can make an NT/2K/XP version, Win4Lin will probably die in a year or two. I don't know what kind of R&D NeTraverse has, as this product is basically a port of Merge from SCO to Linux.
Finally, some potential Win4Lin or VMware customers may find that connecting to a second machine with VNC is just as good a solution.
Hmm...VMware...
(click) [VMware open]
(click) [VMware open]
(click) [VMware open]
(click) [VMware open]
"Huh, what? Wait a sec. Just a few more clicks, and I'll have a beowulf cluster of these..."
(click)
(click)
(click)
(click)...
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
First of all, the claim that you have to depend upon Netraverse is just FUD. Netraverse has done a very good job of supplying kernel patches; they've got all of the patches up to the 2.4.18 kernel available. Also, I wouldn't consider downloading a boot image for windows 98 from a common site exactly jumping through hoops - thats all I had to do.
Also, the claim that they'll die is also FUD. They've on version 4.0 now, which only just came out, and it works with ME as well. And they really do have a good claim to fame: in my experience, their product works at the same speed as native windows (unlike VMWare, which I'm told runs at about half speed or less).
However, there product has some serious drawbacks which have angered me.
1) v3.0 will only let you use 64MB of RAM. Also, video sucks.
2) Upgrades to remove the limitations COST MONEY. That's right, design flaws that are the fault of the software designers (because they used an old BIOS to do their initial design) are almost as expensive as the actual products ($20 less).
3) Documentation is very bad, and there are some serious memory requirements which are barely mentioned (each user gets their own "windows partition" with their own copies of ALL system files - about 200MB/user on top of the 400MB that is required for the initial install). With the help of tech support, I got it to work on my system after A MONTH of e-mails - two from me each weekday, and one from them.
Still, it runs, and only crashes occasionally due to some thrashing problems. As "nice" as their product works, Its quite frustrating that they expect their customers who have already contributed a substantial sum to also pay for the upgrade in which they fix their bugs. Its almost like paying for the latest version of Windows, except that instead of getting features I don't use to go along with the bug fixes, I'm getting only the bug fixes. I believe Windows at least uses service packs.
I'm done paying until they start playing nice. I bought the product initially with the understanding that this was a promising product that they where going to improve upon, and give to their current users and sell to other users (like they did from v2.0 to v3.0).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I believe that's why it wasn't included in the comparison.
Here is the official word from VMWare: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws3/doc/ws31_guestos a2.html#1025242
I install VMWare on my OS
I install an OS in that VMWare
I install VMWare on that OS
I install an OS in that VMWare
I install VMWare on that OS
I install an OS in that VMWare
Its like looking into a mirror...
That's the best idea I've heard in a while. Well, second best if you count shutting down slashdot.
I've got VirtualPC 5 on OS X with two virtual machines, one installed with WinXP and the other installed with Mandrake 8.2. Obviously, it takes a year to boot all the way to KDE and get it up and running, and its noticeably slow, but it is not so slow as to be unuseable. For the few times when I actually need access to a Linux desktop, it has been the perfect solution.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
If you know Unix, you'll feel at home. Well, I feel at home
And now to stay on topic: I have used bochs on the iBook (with OS X of course). I was quite impressed that it would run at all (I was expecting nothing at all). The only reason I would like to use emulation is that I'd like to play the original civilisation on my iBook under DOS. I didn't figure out how to install DOS however, since I only have the DOS drive and an iBook doesn't have a diskette reader (not that I complain, I never missed it except on this exact occasion).
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Absolutely excellent.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Just to quote the story firstly :
"I got a dual 533, and it is just not tolerable. I even tried VirtualPC at the dual 450 PIII under Win98 with 512 MB of RAM, with OpenSTEP as the guest OS, but it was equally slow."
So he is saying that he used a Dual PIII 450 under Windows 98, but couldnt notice a speed difference? Now as I said - either I am reading this wrong, or the writer has made a mistake - Windows 98 doesnt support dual processor.. so what the hell is he going on about?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
If you read the bottom of the page you'd see he used WXP Pro as the host, and all the others were guests. I know the article body was poorly done, but man, you just got to waits to the end before leaving the show, else what was the point.
Kick LA's Ass, Spurs!
Come on. You're not giving them enough credit. After all they've got hello world working fine. It's only a matter of time until it runs MS Office.
Really? I did the opposite and got my emulated RedHat to use XDarwin as it's window server via the network. Suddenly, it feel like native speed! I guess that might just be because the emulated x86 has less to do but it's a good trick to speed up emulated X-Window based unixes.
ANyone using his +1 bonus to tell to mod someone p should be modded down.
Any Anonymous Coward telling someone how to use their +1 bonus shouldn't be listened to.
http://function.linuxpower.ca/dmesg-smpu nction.linuxpower.ca/top-4way
http://f
signal(SIGPHB, SIG_IGN);
Caldera/SCO OpenUNIX 8 (and UnixWare 7) do not run under VMWare, nor does BSDi BSD/OS 4.2.
BSD/OS 4.2 was actually very close to working for me, but I think it had the same problem with the driver for ethernet controller that OpenBSD had. OpenBSD didn't run out of the box correctly until recently (version 2.9) which worked around this problem.
It looks like Wind River finally released a BSD/OS 4.3, so maybe they've addressed this issue.
I haven't tried NetBSD recently, but I would think that VMware compatibility would be a priority for those guys.
That said, VMware is *highly* recommended for any developer, especially those interested in portability, since it makes it easy to test your app on a variety of x86 operating systems.
Er...can you read Russian...where do you download from...
-- SIGFPE
I just wanted to follow up on this, as I've been waiting almost three weeks for Red Hat 7.3 patches. The patches still aren't available, but the prepatched 2.4.18-3 kernel (already out of date) is available through the GUI installer, as of this week.
I never said you can't get kernel patches; I said: "you're dependent on NeTraverse" releasing patches. I tried to apply the generic 2.4.18 to Red Hat's 2.4.18-3 and -4. It didn't work, because of a 20 MB Alan Cox patch. Again, not faulting Win4Lin, but pointing out the dependency.
No FUD here. In fact, your counter FUD sounds like PROP: press-release optimism.