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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!
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
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.
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.
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