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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)."
I don't mean to offend but I'm not going to consider it serious competition until it's managed a few months/years of actual use, as opposed to being merely a beta product that isn't even out for the public yet.
It's pretty surprizing since doesn't VMware hold several patents on running virtual guest operating systems like Uniden holds a crap load of patents on how to listen on different frequencies? I know bad example, but I couldn't think of anything else at the moment. ;)
This space is not for rent.
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!
Is it fast?
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.
Can't we strip down the "OS" to just this kind of layer that centralizes access to the unique local hardware and process space? Then the "hosted" OS'es can just be commonly installed apps and libraries. We can carve them up to reduce redundancy. Signed APIs for IPC ACLs would complete this picture. It would remove many of the limits to scaling a processor off a single machine, to any available network resources. And the open source OS'es would be more fit to reproduce in this environment.
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"
- WB Yeats, "Things Fall Apart"
--
make install -not war
Ah, well. Trust OS News to be short on technical details. Or even on proper grammar.
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
Imagine the possibilities. You can boot Windows XP, start this Serenity thing, boot a Linux image into it, run Bochs, and boot Windows 95 into that. And then you'll be set, my friend, because you know what they say: once the Linux community gets this circular OS booting thing going on, Linux will make definite inroads. Watch out, Redmond.
Actually, if you want to run virtual machines, the way to go might be the AMD 64-bit machines, which supposedly have the proper hardware support virtual IA-32 machines. Has anybody tried that yet?
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.
insanity later
...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
Minor but significant difference.
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
People stay on Windows because:
.NET or Cocoa), and so forth. Personally, I'm looking forward to the 1.0 release of Y-Windows.
- It's easy to use (before someone chimes in with their anecdotal "this happened to me once" situation, yes, for the majority of people Windows is very easy to use)
- Easy to download and install drivers.
- As a result, easy to go down to Wal-mart and buy a new printer and have it work in less than a minute.
- 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"
- Old software still works. I can run my Windows 3.1 programs in XP if I wanted to. 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? Meanwhile, I can run a Windows app from 10 years ago with no problems.
If you honestly think the reason that 95% of the marketshare is using Windows is simply because of Photoshop, you're deluded. OS X has Photoshop as well, but look at its share compared to Windows.
Note that despite all this, Linux can catch up and defeat Windows. But it has to abandon XFree86, implement things like binary installation/uninstallation APIs, one sane toolkit that is a joy to program for (i.e., like
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!"
I believe that would be OS/390^W z/OS this week.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
the i386 aarchitecture is an inheriently non-virtulaizable architecture. The reason for this is the presence of 17 non privileged sensitive instructions. VMware has to modify binary code before executing i386 binaries natively in a VM. Even in that case, we arent really sure what it is they do since it is closed source.
I would be very very careful with VMs for i386 unless of course i knew exaclty how it was handling those 17 instructions. Just becasue it can run programs does not mean that it is a proper VM or even that it is a secure VM.
There is a chance you can mess up your machine with theset things.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Apart from the obvious reference to the village I live in (Svista), is this some Firefly reference going on right under our noses?
One irritating thing about VMWare Workstation is that it's only officially supported with a few very specific kernel versions with standard configurations. In my experience, sometimes it's a problem, sometimes it's not. Serenity reportedly supports all 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels.
On another note, VMware released several versions of their software before they finally included such important features as USB support. Even though it's still unclear whether such features will make it into the first official release of Serenity, one wonders how soon an open source project of this magnitude will be able to match VMware Workstation 4.x's performance and core feature set--especially considering that Serenity's supported OS's already rival VMware's.
If Serenity is more responsive in windowed mode than VMware Workstation, then that's already a big plus.
STEVEs want an open road, the Mustang GT390 of hardware and the Jacqueline Bisset of algorithms... and, er, hardware.
STOUs want to "send a picture" and "read mail".
A STOU doesn't really buy much software. A STOU doesn't even buy the OS: it comes with the "mail reader" or "picture scanner", or they get it for free from someone. A STOU doesn't care about the implications of anything he needs to do his task. (SUVs are for STOUs.)
In the 90s, MonopoSoft was happy to let piracy go on because it captured STOUshare for them. MonospoSoft understands the economic importance of STOUshare. The first version of M-Windows for which MonopoSoft has seriously tried to control piracy is XP.
It's just much easier for everyone in the retail food-chain to steer and market to STOUs. Why have a variety of foods when this bag of chips -- the brand your neighbours are eating! -- will do just fine. Oh, by the way, you can't eat anything else.
Linux, the STEVE OS, has done most of the catching up that it can with STEVEs. In nations with low per-capita income and a mistrust of the US and MonopoSoft, Linux will probably gain STOUshare.Until STOUs can talk about Linux without having to know what they are talking about, Linux will not gain STOUshare.
Until STOUs can call a Help Desk and talk to more STOUs about problems neither of them understands, Linux will not gain STOUshare.
Until Linux can do MORE than M-Windows can while supporting all that M-Windows supports and working flawlessly with everything that MonopoSoft controls, Linux can't direct where the market goes and cannot gain STOUshare in North America.
The outlook is bleak. But there is a trump card: any OS that makes Jacqueline Bisset want you is so STEVE that even all the STOUs will fight for it.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.