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OpenOSX Provides Virtual PC Alternative
lucas.clemente writes "OpenOSX has just announced a cheap alternative to Microsoft's Virtual PC for Mac OS X, OpenOSX WinTel. What's more, the OpenOSX version will be compatible with Apple's new G5 architecture, whereas Virtual PC users will have to wait until the next major upgrade for G5 compatibility." It's a frontend to bochs, which we've discussed before as a possible Virtual PC replacement, and the biggest obstacle seemed to be getting it up and running. Perhaps this product will fill that hole. Prices start at $25 for download, but it is covered under the GPL.
Cool. BTW before anyone asks. Yes you can charge for GPL software.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Bochs needs a front end for Linux too!
BTW... Is anyone out there using Bochs?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Bochs is so much slower than Virtual PC that I don't consider it an alternative at all.
Getting Windows 95 to run acceptably on my last comouter was impossible in Bochs, and oh so easy in VPC.
Just wait for a VPC update. I'm sure you won't have to wait for 7.0.
Also, I refuse to use software from OpenOSX. All they do is recompile popular software, then put it on CD for you for silly amounts of money.
I.E. - Want GIMP?
Step 1) Download and install fink - http://fink.sourceforge.net
Step 2) % sudo apt-get install gimp
OR
Pay OpenOS X a whole bunch of money.
"The software on this CD is distributed under the GNU General Public License and the OpenOSX WinTel License."
The only link on the page I can see to anything about a license is a link to the GPL
I have no idea what the actual software is released under. They currently do not seem to have the OpenOSX WinTel license available yet to look at.
This looks interesting, though. Almost enough for me to install it.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Who thinks they're going to get C&Ded by at least one of the three trademark owners they reference with their product's name? I'd say Apple and Microsoft would even have a bit of a leg to stand on in court, but I guess Intel really wouldn't.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I did a little looking around the site -- I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this product . Specifically, I'm wondering if you can successfully use a printer attached to the Mac?
Also, does anyone have experience running Quicken 2002 (Home & Business) under this?
Before you post something about them not abiding by the GPL by charging for their software, I suggest you read the GPL FAQ.
Ok, so this new alternative may not be as fast as Virtual PC. But you know what really impresses me? Look at how quickly an alternative to this Virtual PC problem was produced. Five years ago, it would have been "eh, it's just Mac. Screw 'em." But the G5 just came out and there's already an alternative to a problem. Perhaps it'll keep Microsoft on their toes. Perhaps other developers will go "damn, we best be writin' some stuff for them too." It's refreshing to see developers rushing to fill the void so quickly.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
1 As said before, bochs is extremely slow. Their own page does not even recommend that you install Win2k or XP.
2 This project is not new. It has been around for I don't know how long, at least a few months. The only new thing is support for the G5.
3 It is suspected that this organization is ripping off compiled binaries from Fink without giving credit. Read about it in the Fink FAQ.
It would be much more useful for someone to create an OS X port of qemu [http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/] and wine [winehq.com] and post it somewhere. Both of these programs have very good things said about them, as far as performance and stability, but I don't know how well they work on OS X.
1. bochs is definitely not new, been around for at least two years (maybe more) 2. a port of wine would do nearly no good as it is just a wrapper for Windows API calls. it doesn't have to interpret IA-32 code because it's designed to run on x86 processors. I haven't heard of qemu, no idea what it is, so I'm checking it out now. Perhaps a combination of a IA-32 emulator and wine would be ok, but adding levels to emulation like that is just asking for slow-down.
bah, forgot HTML and the qemu site has the software patent "crap" up.
Can I make my Mac run the LoveSan virus?
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Robert Atlee was one of the founders of this company, and provided a substantial part of the initial equipment and funding. He is listed on the contact page rather unprofessionally as "terminated." I spoke with him on the phone about three months after he footed the bill for the double-wide booth that Jeshua Lacock ran at MacWorld. He was rather upset at the time that Jeshua had basically skipped town with a bunch of his computer equipment and had locked him out of the web server etc. I'm sure that every story has two sides, but at this point in time, not only Mr. Atlee, and Christoph Pfisterer, but also myself have received poor treatment at the hands of Jeshua Lacock, the sole proprietor of OpenOSX.
Slashdot doesn't probably have the budget that professional news sources do, so we can't expect all of the stories to be double or triple cross-checked. My guess is that if you start asking around (tax records? employees? better business bureau?), you'll find that few others have genuinely benefitted at the hands of this opportunist. The MacGIMP project helped to fund GIMPCon 2003. Has OpenOSX EVER given back to the community that built the software it sells?
One of the first rules of polite public behaviour is to give credit where it is due. Jeshua has attacked my reputation and left a rude web page up with my name on it (after numerous requests to have it taken down) and upset a very good open source developer (Chris Pfisterer) and has managed to con his business partner out of the equipment it took to get everything he had started. Make up your own mind, but I refuse to do business with someone who has managed to offend this many reasonable people without having made any visible efforts whatsoever to set things right.
After reading all your comments, I'm not certain who is misunderstanding whom. Openosx has to supply (on request) the source to whomever they distribute binaries they compiled from GPLed code. Nowhere in the GPL does it say source has to be available to all comers.
Perhaps you realize this, but I'm not reading you that way. I suggest you email the openosx folks and ask them how they distribute the source to their customers.
The GPL says that the source has to be provided "from the same place" as the binary. As they are offering a download, I would expect at least a link from their download site, if not directly to the sources (which is not strictly required as you point out, they have the option of making the sources available only upon request), then at least to a page that explains how one can acquire the sources.
At any rate, it may very well be that they distribute the source with the binary. I have taken your suggestion and written them to ask how one may obtain the sources.
But riddle me this, why are all of rmorh02's posts in this thread moderated higher than mine (or yours)--even his comments that are absolutely incorrect? My message that pointed out his incorrect assessment of the GPL is mod'd at 1 while both his original incorrect message and his message to concede his error is mod'd 2. Sounds fishy, doesn't it?
Because s/he has accrued enough karma to earn a karma bonus point.
The FAQ for the GPL has a question that deals with this (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCRedis tributedBinariesGetSource) by asking if the same offer can be used to obtain the source. The answer is:
"Yes, you can. The offer must be open to everyone who has a copy of the binary that it accompanies. This is why the GPL says your friend must give you a copy of the offer along with a copy of the binary---so you can take advantage of it."
Thanks for explaining the karma thing to me and my apologies to rmohr02 in that regard.
FYI this product has been out for well over a year(I bought a copy last December I believe).
Before I bought it I downloaded Bochs. I am no ubergeek, so I didn't even get past compiling it.
It works. First I ran Linux on it, then got DOS running, then Win95. It works. It works. It's slow. It works. Compared to spending hundreds of dollars to buy Microsoft's Virtual PC, this is magical. (plus, they have nice bundles where you can get open-source Office, GIMP, and other such programs together for very nice prices... yes, I am a newbie and I don't want to use Fink anymore)
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
I've been using Windows emulators on Macs since the "beginning" and have 4 licenses for VPC currently, but we use them on laptops, where it would be inconvenient to bring along a PC laptop AND a Mac laptop just to have access to more than one platform. For desktop use, one can add a PC for not much more than the price of VPC + OS and, if space is a problem, as it is for me, build an inexpensive Athlon PC with a Shuttle case and put in a KVM switch to keep to a single keyboard and monitor.
We have 3 shuttles with 2400+ processors, 256MB ram, 80GB drives, running Windows 2000 Pro. We already had flat panel monitors which the iBook users mirror when sitting at a desk, so it was simple to place a KVM between their external keyboard/mouse and monitor. The cost of the box was less than $400 each and that included an OEM Radeon 9000 Pro in each of them, which is not really necessary for standard 2D work as they come with decent graphics built in for modest 2D work.
I just don't see the gains for running VPC on a desktop Mac considering the low price of PC hardware; but for a laptop, it's really handy and since there's not much chance of a G5 laptop anytime soon, we can hope there will be a workable solution when and if the G5 architecture comes to Powerbooks.
I'd rather run Bochs for free (or at worse, very cheaply) that pay significantly more to Microsoft for crippled future releases of VPC to ensure that performance sucks (even after the architectural differences are taken into account).
Look, I loathe and distrust Microsoft as much as the next guy, but--what incentive do they have to cripple Virtual PC?
Microsoft profits from the sale of Windows for Virtual PC in the same way it profits from the sale of Wndows for actual x86 hardware.
Microsoft may very well sell other software products that run under Virtual PC at the same rates they sell those products for actual x86 hardware.
Apple is only the enemy of Microsoft because Apple hardware a) doesn't run Windows and b) exemplifies an alternative to Windows hegemony. But,
It seems to me that if some application is capable of running Windows and Windows applications aptly on the Macintosh platform, this turn of events is only in Microsoft's interest.
I mean, they have no real hope of "crushing" the Macintosh platform -- there are too many addicts, Apple is far too liquid, and people just plain hate Microsoft. Virtual PC provides them a way to continue to profit from Apple.
You'll have to scroll down a lot to get to the actual interview.
Fink Relations with OpenOSX
Note: This page represents the view of Fink project leader Christoph Pfisterer. Other people, including other Fink project members, may have different views.
Here's the story of the relations between the Fink project and OpenOSX. It is unpleasant, but I feel that is has to be made public.
OpenOSX is a business that sells a range of CDs of Open Source applications. The GIMP CD they sell is based to a large part of Fink 0.2.1. Until very recently, the OpenOSX web site made no mention at all of Fink, and as far as I can tell, the CDs themselves still contain no hints. My impression (and that of many others) was that OpenOSX did all the porting - which has now turned out to be wrong.
I was never contacted by OpenOSX about their usage of Fink. Instead, I was notified of the situation by a third party. What followed was a rather unpleasant e-mail conversation with OpenOSX owner Jeshua Lacock. The net result? We almost broke into a flame war and OpenOSX has slightly modified their web site to cover their tracks. They still don't have the courage to openly say which parts are their work and which parts aren't. It also appears they don't want to cooperate with the rest of the Mac OS X Open Source community, and Jeshua doesn't feel like responding to my mails as promised.
I encourage everyone to read the e-mail exchange that led to this and judge for themselves. (Be warned that it's quite lengthy, though.)
-Christoph Pfisterer
Copyright(C)2001-03 TheFinkProject
Last changed by chrisp on Thu, Aug 23 2001, 05:44 GMT
How hard can it be to get something to add a link to fink's web-site?
Like pulling teeth when Jeshua Lacock is involved.
This is, perhaps, a bit off-topic, but I have yet to find anything like this on Mac OS X. Is there a VMWare (or VPC on Windows) sort of package available on Mac OS X that would let me run multiple, concurrent versions of OS X?
For example, I develop Mac software. If I could simultaneously test my product on 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 without having to reboot or use different computers it would save me a huge deal of time and money.
Please tell me this exists somewhere out there.
(and if not, someone should start such a project. open source or commercial.)
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
PS: Did I miss something about using Links in /.?
Now if only I had a PPC emulator for i86 Windows, then I could run mac OSX on top of my WINE running on Linux Running on Boch running on OSX. I could then have it running mac Classic and emulate my 68000 processor that emulated my Atari 6502.
Finally I'll fire up a web browser, kick back and re-read Nick Bostroms "you are almost certainly living in a simulation" web page.
The only problem would be not knowing which window to close when I was done.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The 'files' are not cross-platform compatible between teh win and mac version of Qucken/Quickbooks. In other words, I can't open the company QB file on my mac since my partner created the file using the win version.
We compromised and now subscribe to QBs web version.
IE using WebKit would be pointless. The only reason people use IE for the most part anymore is because it has the rendering engine which most websites are designed to work correctly on - or because they used Windows and think "it's good enough". And can you point me to the KHTML code modified to work native in Aqua without Qt? Safari is based on on KHTML but it's heavily modified to tie into Aqua and Quartz instead of Qt and the KDE libraries.
That is not to say that I think the real reason Microsoft quit producing IE was because they lacked the information about the OS that Apple had. Rather it just didn't make good business sense anymore. They probably just put that bit about not having the operating system code in there so that they could finally accuse someone else of one of the things they had always been accused of.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
I beta-tested QuickBooks Pro 5.0 for Mac, and was seriously peeved to discover that it could only import files from the most recent Mac version. I don't know what Intuit is thinking, but even Microsoft manages to create products that can open files from a couple versions back, and file formats that are the same on Windows and Mac.
Here's a solution:
Get a beefy Apple machine that meets your needs (new dualie G5?). Get it with more than one hard drive. put LINUX (I prefer Gentoo to get the optimizations I like) on it, install MOL (Mac On Linux) and make up raw disk images for any Mac OS systems you want to try out. MOL works really well, and it can handle multiple concurrent instances, IIRC. And while you won't have graphics _acceleration_ the overall speed is comparable to classic (about 95% of normal speed) because it's NOT an emulator, it's basically VMWare for the PowerPC.
I use MOL to play A-10 Attack on OS9 when I get overbored.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
This is a much better solution than VPC, IMHO, considering that you can buy a really cheap Windows box and every application runs natively this way.
I'd sooner give MSFT my money than this opportunistic larrikin.
In the UK there is NO Mac version of Quicken. This has forced me and other members of my family to buy VPC and Windows just to run Quicken. That is $300+ extra to run Quicken - that hurts.
Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator)
My understanding is that Wine is not an emulator. Instead, they rewrote the Win32 API as a layer that called a set of X API functions to mimic the Win32 call.
Simply "porting" WINE to OSX would mean rewriting the entire thing. Sure, OSX is unix based, but there's a lot of stuff.
Now, if they DID decide to fork a WINE project for Mac OSX, that would be cool. Because, personally, I think they could get better performance using Mac OSX as the bottom layer instead of X
Right, so that part is relatively easy, since there is a good X implementaion on OSX. A Quartz native port of WINE would be a huge amount of work, but would presumably be a lot more efficient (speedy).
Johnny
...is that it doesn't even come close to rendering right in Safari.
Who is that program for, again?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I do software testing and web page testing on my Mac. I test on WinXP, Win2k, Win98, Win95, and will eventually be adding Win2003 Server. Have a load of prestine hard drive images... every time I need to do a test, I copy one, start from it, and see what happens.
It's oh, so convenient.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Don't even think about using an application like Quicken unless you have a screaming fast Mac. I have not idea if printing works, I never could get that far. I paid $25 for WinTel and am VERY disatisfied. They claim that it is about the same as VPC. It's really about 10x slower. On my 350Mhz G4 it took me 2 days (busy cpu the whole time) to install Windows 98 and get it booted. It takes well over 30 minutes to boot Win98. Then to double click "My Computer" it takes 30 seconds for the window to paint. VPC is much faster, but my VPC is version 3 which is OS 9 only (not classic) and I don't really want to pay for a new copy, but the upgrade won't upgrade from 3 to 6. But WinTel (really Bochs) is way too slow to use. I asked for a refund and they refused saying that once I had downloaded it (but before installing) I had "Opened" it and their return policy does not refund on "Opened software". I'm hacked!
"choose for yourselves today whom you will serve;... but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Joshua