Boot Linux (or OpenBSD Or Oberon Or FreeDOS) In Your Browser (copy.sh)

Long-time Slashdot reader DeQueue writes: Back in 2011 Fabrice Bellard, the initiator of the QEMU emulator, wrote a PC emulator in JavaScript that let you boot Linux in your browser. But he didn't stop there.

On his website he now has images that let you boot Oberon, Arch Linux, FreeDOS, OpenBSD, Solar OS and more recent versions of Linux such as 2.6 or 3.18 (the 3.18 image includes internet access). You can also boot to a CD image, or a floppy image, or a hard drive disk image on your local machine. And, if you don't need yet another operating system on your computer, you can even boot to Bootchess and play chess

Comments

I guess I'm the first to comment because

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody is busy playing with it...

Worthless

[cerberusss]

The first thing I tried to do, is launch Win98. That worked. Then with Internet Explorer, go to Fabrice Bellard's site again and launch Windows 98 inside the VM. But now IE wants to install a modem first :(

Re:Worthless

[Khyber]

"You'd even struggle to download a modern Firefox that worked on '98."

I guess someone doesn't know about OldVersion.

Fabrice Bellard is awesome.

[queazocotal]

Lzexe - exe file compression on the PC to fit more on your floppy.
Qemu - emulate random processors on your PC.
tccboot - boot linux using a live C compiler.
Live broadcast of digital video using a VGA card. ...

Re:Fabrice Bellard is awesome.

[Cajun Hell]

He is talking about a computer program called lzexe, not the compression algorithm that it used.

Re:Fabrice Bellard is awesome.

[marcansoft]

Too bad this isn't his.

Fabian Hemmer (http://copy.sh/, copy@copy.sh)

I have no idea where the submitter got Fabrice Bellard from. This is hosted on a completely different site and authored by a completely different person. Yes, more than one person is capable of implementing an x86 emulator in Javascript. Bellard wrote his and never released the (editable) source; this guy, OTOH, wrote a more compatible emulator of his own (runs more than Linux) and open sourced it.

This is also old news, I remember seeing it quite some time ago. The site has been up since 2014. Slow news day much?

Re:Fabrice Bellard is awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Lzexe - exe file compression on the PC to fit more on your floppy.
Correct.

> LZ compression was invented by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977
Correct.

LZ compression mechanism was invented by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv but lzexe, a dos utility using that algorithm to compress EXE files was created by Fabrice Bellard.

Yes!

[ledow]

I beat my record!

Run the Win98 one.

Shut it down.

It BSOD's with 0E exception in VXD VDD.

That's got to be a world-record in terms of "number of instructions executed before a fatal error".

Re:Wow

[jellomizer]

Where do you draw the line?

Browsers use to just do text with hyperlinks, then we added formatted text and then pictures, additional text positional and formatting. Then we added input form features. After that we did some preserver checks to validate information before sending to the server so people didn't have to wait for a response. The types of checks got more complex and also needed better ways to show the validated info. Then we realized we didn't need to reload the whole page just send the data needed, based on the data the display can be changed...

Once you give a programmer a tool, that can do IF, Loops and store variables it becomes a development platform.