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Review Of Serenity Virtual Station

Posted by timothy on from the one-should-be-calm dept.

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)."

17 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Why people stay on Windows by rdsmith4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There was a discussion here recently about why so many haven't given Windows up. There were various reasons presented but the main one seemed to be Adobe Photoshop - 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!

    1. Re:Why people stay on Windows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      It's more than just photoshop, i set my friend up with a sun ultra 5 with solaris 9/gnome installed till we got the parts he needed for building his new windows system. He called me more than when his peecee was on the fritz, even though some simple trial and error would of solved most of his problems. I think windows users as a whole are predisposed towards mindless computer use, and have a hard time adapting to new situations. I think thats why a lot of folks still dual boot, when linux/unix does something they don't understand, or are unwilling to learn about, they can boot into the safe/warm thoughtless windows os.

    2. Re:Why people stay on Windows by grotgrot · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You forgot Qemu. It is fast, open source and doing really well. As a bonus as well as dealing with an entire virtual machine, it can also do individual Linux processes (on a Linux host). That way a PPC Linux user can run i386 Linux binaries (including Wine).

    3. Re:Why people stay on Windows by KrispyKringle · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Strange, I did forget it. I mentioned in in my post just prior, though.

      Have you had a lotta luck with it? I was able to run Linux on Linux (but I may as well use UML then), and it was quite fast, but I didn't have Win98 handy to try, which as I heard it was the only Windows to work on Qemu (and even then, quite unreliably). Know anything about that?

    4. Re:Why people stay on Windows by jrockway · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Back when I had my G4 cube, qemu ran wine just fine. I was shocked to have Windows programs running on my PPC box. I didn't do anything special either, just downloaded and ran whatever they had available at the time.

      --
      My other car is first.
  2. Two Questions by Rick+and+Roll · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I like to use virtualized computers for software development and testing. There are two questions I have before I will seriously consider this.

    1. How much does it cost?
    2. What will be the basic terms of the licensing?

    3. VMWare pricing is a little steep. It is a fantastic product. I don't, however, use all of its features. One that provided the basic functionality, which is a fast, easy-to-use virtual machine at a fraction of the cost would be useful.

      Also, I would want to be sure that the licensing is per-user, and you can install it on any number of host computers you like, provided only you use it. I would not want to have to pay for a separate copy to use under Windows or Linux, because sometimes I will be on my Windows box emulating Linux, and sometimes on my Linux box emulating windows. I myself might use them concurrently, but I will be the user.

      Just two thoughts before giving this serious consideration as an alternative to VMWare.

  3. Free? by tyler_larson · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I didn't see anything on their site about licensing cost, but it doesn't look like it's free.

    Does anyone know about a free alternative to VMWare etc.? It sure would be nice to be able to run "the other OS" in a virtual machine while I'm on Linux or Windows... but not nice enought to warrant paying for it.

    --
    "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
    RFC 1925
    1. Re:Free? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There is an up-and-coming x86 (and PowerPC and ARM) emulator named QEMU that is over 60 times faster than Bochs (resulting in being ~4x slower than native code). It'll be a while before running Windows on QEMU is reliable, but it can be installed and booted on the virtual machine right now.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  4. VMWare Price Drop by Sunlighter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    VMWare just chopped $100 off the price of VMWare Workstation. You can now buy version 4.5 for $199 (boxed) or $189 (download).

    At the lower price, Im considering buying it myself. (I would buy only one copy for only one host OS.) Maybe theyre feeling the heat from all that open source competition.

    --
    Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
  5. PowerPC version of Virtual Machine? by -tji · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Since buying my 15" PowerBook G4, I've been able to replicate most of the main functions I had on previous Linux or Windows boxes.

    About the only think I haven't got is a good PPC vertual machine application. Yes, there is VirtualPC, but that emulates a completely different architecture (x86), so there will be a big performance hit. What I am looking for is the equivalent of VMWare for PowerPC. I could then have a farily light weight LinuxPPC image for all my Linux needs, rather than needing to repartition my drive and create a dual boot Linux/MacOS X system.

    Does such a thing exist?

    1. Re:PowerPC version of Virtual Machine? by pschmied · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Mac-on-Linux is a start. I've used it in the past, and it was quite snappy (on par with VMWare for x86). Unfortunately, it is only hosted under Linux. But for guest operating systems it claims to support Linux, MacOS 9, and MacOS X.

      I've occasionally had the desire to do some sandboxed work on my Mac (I use VMWare for the PC all the time), but I can't bring myself to install Linux on my Powerbook. Removing FreeBSD and installing Linux on my PC (for VMWare) was hard enough.

      But, if you can live with Linux as your host OS on your Mac, give MOL a shot.

      -Peter

      --
      . Penguins Surely Ca
  6. Unless it offers... by Trolling4Dollars · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...spectacularly better performance or a lower price compared to VMware, it's of no value to me. Actually, I'm quite sorry to see the direction plex86 has gone in becuse they could have offered a nice alternative to VMware. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be any company who has hit on the idea of an OS specifically GEARED towards virtualization. I think they'd steal the show. VMware on Linux is about the closest you can get to that right now. But the perfect solution would be a thin OS with no GUI that just allows you to install and run multiple OSes simultaneously.

    --
    Un-news
    1. Re:Unless it offers... by isj · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually IBM z/VM is geared toward virtualization. Everything you run on it is running inside its own VM. The instruction set is also virtualized - it is changed on-the-fly to whatever the CPU supports. That is how old programs from the sixties can still run on modern hardware.

      More information at http://www.vm.ibm.com/

      But z/VM will not be the "new virtual machine" for desktops because: (a) the virtual instruction set is s390, (b) all I/O is done through "channels", (c) you need big iron to run it.

  7. OSX by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Is there any sort of emulator that can allow people with x86 architecture boxes to run OSX? I'm not sure about the details involved in creating something like that or if it is even possible so edify me.

  8. Re:Denial of OS by naasking · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, we can. It's called a microkernel.

    True.

    The most popular one is Mach

    Barf. Not to sound rude, but Mach is a horrid base for an operating system. I'm sorry Apple went with it.

    If you mean popular as in "most widely used", then yes, Mach is the most popular "microkernel" (though it doesn't really fit the definition).

    Mach is far from the most popular in hacker or academic circles (ie. those who know any better). L4 and EROS are far more suitable hosts for a guest operating system. L4 already has Linux 2.2 and 2.4 running as hosts in fact.

    --
    Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
  9. Re:Serious? by dryeo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I won't consider it serious competition for Bochs and VirtualPC until it can run on one architecture, emulate a different architecture and run an OS for the emulated architecture.

    It is not really meant to compete with Bochs and VirtualPC. It is meant to ease the migration of 10 Million OS/2 machines to something else, this week I think its Linux. IBM really wants businesses to get of OS/2 and doesn't want to spend much to support it.
    IBMs future plans for OS/2 involve mostly supporting it on a virtual machine so they don't have to write too many device drivers.
    Bochs doesn't run OS/2 and MS bought out VirtualPC
    so VirtualPC for OS/2 was pulled by MS.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  10. Re:Why? by asit+ler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    He's not being a zealot.

    1) Old people don't normally use Linux.
    2) If they do, they're in the IT field.
    3) Your argument about automatically working on plug-in fits MacOS x.y like a glove.
    4) Old software working: You have a mainly valid point here.
    5) As many OSS beacons would say: "Backwards compatibility is for people who can't write new software." (well, okay, that was a paraphrasing of Linus, but it applies IMHO)

    You can't write good software if you're trying to keep compatibility with version x.y.z-abcd of libblah-x.yz, when libblah was deprecated aeons ago. It's like writing CD-RW programs that need SCSI-emulation, when we have 2.6 with successful ATAPI burning support.

    As a computer security professor I talked to once said: "If you don't start out with security as a Job 0 process, and instead work on making the old stuff good by patching it together, you eventually come out with a Microsoft product."

    While Linux isn't really written with security as job 0, its use of the GPL makes it very subject to peer-review and this makes security very prominent in the development cycle.

    Distros like Debian, with its Security Team, also contribute scads of security stuff, as well as reviewing non-kernel code for security holes.

    In summary, breaking software support is not necessarily a bad thing. Backwards compatibility is taken far too seriously in the PC world. Example: the outburst back in the mid '90s when the executive decision to move the Amiga community to PowerPC-based stuff, away from the 680x0 processor. This change was almost certainly a good thing, but the outburst from the Amiga zealot community was equivalent to that of a bunch of Mandrake users being told that they're moving over to *BSD or Gentoo and they don't have to configure it themselves.

    You don't see Linux users complaining when libblahfoo.xy doesn't work with kernel 2.6.5 but did with 2.6.4. You see them rewrite their badly-written programs to use libblah-AB instead of libblah-xy because AB is better anyway.

    --
    This is not the sig you're looking for.