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Review Of Serenity Virtual Station
JigSaw writes "Here's some serious competition for VMWare and Virtual PC: OSNews reviews a new OS emulator, the Serenity Virtual Station, which can run as a host on FreeBSD, Linux and OS/2 and supports as guests a slew of OSes. It is based on the twoOStwo virtual operating engine (which additonally runs on top of Windows as well)."
Ah, well. Trust OS News to be short on technical details. Or even on proper grammar.
VMWare is the most popular commercial one (for Linux and Windows; VirtualPC would be the one to try on Apple--unless you just want to emulate PPC on PPC, i.e. run OSX on PPC Linux, in which case Mac On L inux is for you). Bochs is the leading open source contendor, in that it emulates a complete x86 machine, and works on any architecture (SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, etc). However, because of that, it's quite slow, and is far more useful for things like reverse engineering or OS testing than actual desktop use (i.e., if you wan't to see registers in use, it'd be great; if you want to watch a movie or use Photoshop, don't bother). And of course, there's always WINE, which runs a number of Windows programs on Linux quite well.
Yes, there is Bochs, which is able to run Windows 2000, Windows 95 and a lot of Unices. It is an x86 emulator and according to their own FAQ pretty slow. But if you just want to run some programs from time to time - there you go.
HTH
You might try crossover too. I havn't tried it myself, but there's been some good reviews of its support for photoshop in linux.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I don't know what other OS emulators had been available, but if Serenity Virtual Station does what it says it does, now I can delete my Windows partition completely!
You could have done that ages ago.. with VMWare. Serenity isn't any more special than VMWare. From what I can make out, you'll have to pay for it as well!
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Yes, we can. It's called a microkernel. The most popular one is Mach, which typically runs a version of BSD as a userspace process in which programs are run.
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More the heat from Microsoft's (ex Connectix) virtual PC which was originally planned to be cheaper than VMWare Workstation while offering similar features (at least on Windows) (which cannot honestly said for the Open Source ones, or noone would buy either VMWare or Virtual PC anymore).
In any case it's great it has become less expensive as VMWare Workstation really is a great product.
> Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any company who has hit on the idea of an OS specifically GEARED towards virtualization
Google for "Xen", but it's an academic project.
from the Mac-on-Linux site:
;)
Mar 21, 2004 Mac-on-Linux 0.9.70 is out!
It is here, finally! Some highlights:
Support for CD burners
Generic USB support
Generic SCSI support
Sound driver rewrite (and ALSA support)
Networking improvements
Reduced latency
Mac OS X 10.3 acceleration
Performance enhancements
Various bug-fixes
Support for the 2.6 kernel
Debugger improvements
Misc improvements for SMP systems
A lot of other minor modifications
Technical highlights
THIS LINE-->>> Arch separation (yes... mol will soon run under OS X)
Reworked kernel API
New build system
So keep your eye open.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Yeah, the review doesn't seem to show any marked advantages over VMware. Unless they sell it for $20 or give away the Linux version, I don't see them stealing any of VMware's market share.
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They're both cute, but neither one has usable payroll. In GNUCash, you have to figure out all of the formulas yourself for each employee? That's insane! If they don't do payroll well, they're useless to me. I'm sure that they're lacking in other features, too, but that's one reason why the poster would say that his wife, an accountant, doesn't have any useable OSS.
> People stay on Windows because:
>
> - Easy to download and install drivers.
When they work, they work great. The problem is, there often don't work that well. Linux doesn't have drivers for everything, but for the drivers that they do have are rock solid and more generic. USB drivers is a prime example. Windows XP requires drivers for some stuff that Linux works with out of the box. Why doesn't the newest version of Windows treat something as generic as USB more generically?
> - As a result, easy to go down to Wal-mart and
> buy a new printer and have it work in less than
> a minute.
I've yet to have a problem with printers. What distribution are you using?
> - Endless software, including lots of freeware.
> There's more software for Windows because
> Windows is easier to develop for, with no
> endless list of competing, inconsistent
> toolkits that exist simply to reinvent the
> wheel yet again and introduce another "choice"
Actually, one of the reasons why I moved to Linux is precisely because there is *more* free software on Linux. There's lots of shareware on Windows, but many contain spyware the ones that don't often contain nagware or inconveniences like having their buttons switch randomly (e.g. WinZip). Linux free software programs have none of this nagware or spyware and you don't have to feel guilty for using it. You don't have to feel guilty about not paying for shareware either. And submitting bug reports is actually encouraged. You can also talk to the main developer of a project and actually get a reply! On Windows everyone pirates software at one point or another and there's no way you could ever talk to the lead developer of a project or get help if you didn't pay. On Linux it's easier to be legitimate than not and it's easier to contribute than be greedy.
> - Old software still works. I can run my
> Windows 3.1 programs in XP if I wanted to. I
> can run a Windows app from 10 years ago with no
> problems.
Really? Word 2 doesn't work on Windows 2000 and non of my device drivers from Windows NT work on Windows 2000. Most of my Windows 98 games don't work and forget about DOS. More than a few of my Windows 2000 apps don't work on Windows XP. Why do you think I left windows? I got tired of the upgrade threadmill.
> Linux distros are still a bit of a moving
> target. I can't guarantee an RPM I got five
> years ago will still work, can I?
Ditto for Windows. Win3.1, Win2000, WinXP, and now Longhorn look and work quite differently and there is no guarentee that new versions of Windows can run old software.
If you want consistency, go to a Mac. Except for the OS9 to OSX earthquake change, they have been pretty consistent. You'll also have a much greater chance of running a 20 year old Mac app on even MacOSX than you are of running a 10 year old Windows app.
> But it has to abandon XFree86, implement things
> like binary installation/uninstallation APIs,
Linux is well ahead of Windows on this front. Seriously, I've had no problems with yum (or apt-get) on Linux. Meanwhile on Windows, Installshield has been great when it worked but a nightmare when it doesn't. There are "Windows Program Uninstallers" for a reason.