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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)."

4 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Serious? by theM_xl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Is this for real? by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's not clear what's going on here. If it's an x86 CPU emulator, this is quite possible, but it will be slow. If most code is executing natively, it's necessary to use the hacks VMware does. (IA-32 machines don't hypervise properly, but they're close. That's why VMware is possible, but a horrible hack. Compare VM for IBM mainframes, where the hardware was done right.) The review says that there are no benchmarks because this is a pre-release version.

    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?

  3. Re:Free? by jlp2097 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Why? by bonch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People stay on Windows because:

    - 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 .NET or Cocoa), and so forth. Personally, I'm looking forward to the 1.0 release of Y-Windows.