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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)."
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.