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VMware Alternative Now Available On FreeBSD
An anonymous reader writes "Serenity Systems International has announced a public beta (costing 50 USD) of 'Serenity Virtual Station' running for the first time on FreeBSD. While existing VMware owners are able to run the version 2 or 3 under Linux binary compatibility and the ports of the Linux kernel modules to FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x respectively, there is no working port of the currently available VMware 4 kernel module; this may provide an alternative to those wishing to purchase a VM today." Here is the full announcement, including a link to the online store.
Bochs is known to run Win95, I would imagine it would run other Windows flavors as well, perhaps with varying degrees of success.
Look up qemu.
Well, as the author was asking for a free as in beer way of running a windows environment on *nix systems, bochs satisfies his request. Particularly if he is trying to run wincode on a SPARC or PPC chip.
However, in an attempt to feed the Troll, there is a project called plex86 which attempts to virtualize the hardware, as well as a forked version that is much faster and lighter but only designed to run linux variants. Obligatory links:
Bochs will run a bunch of Windows releases, as well as Linux/x86 and other OSes. But for the most part, it isn't really worth using it- it is slow. As hell. Or, as we say in Minnesota, slow as molasses in January. It's not bad to use Bochs for running old DOS apps- but then again, most people had a computer that was 4-33 MHz or so in the DOS days, so Bochs keeps up well there. But Windows or Linux... Painful.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I tried the Linux version, it looks promising, but is not there yet. The worst part is that Win 2k et al are not very well supported. But maybe they have that working correctly in 2004Q4 too. Anyway, it is nice to see that it runs on FreeBSD. So, vote with your wallet if you want it to stay.
;).
Now we still need a NetBSD version