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VMWare Beta Release
Ever want to Multitaks operating systems?
Thomas Reagan has the answer for us- he says "
VMWare for Linux Beta is out! Go to the homepage to download it! "
Any of you who saw this have been pretty impressed.
If I actually ran a different OS, I'd consider it.
(now if only vmare.com had real bandwidth)
Too bad it's going to cost $300.
So how does it perform?
You should have more than 300$ if you want to make use of this... just think of the amount of memory you need :)
Nice screen shots
heh heh . . . cool . . . cool . . .
Next month is the beta release for Windows NiceTry
What is its expiration date?
I can't get the vmmon-up to compile at all, anyone running into this hangup during install?
Anyone get this badboy running on kernel 2.2.3? It tells me:
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3 was compiled for kernel version 2.0.36
Finding an installable vmmon module
No exact match for vmmon-up-2.2.3. Checking for working alternatives.
No alternatives found, please build a driver locally
None of the prebuilt modules seems to work on this machine.
I can try and build one for you, would you like me to try? [yes]
So I answer yes and it tries to build one and I get:
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-tmp/driver-only'
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol mod_use_count_
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol register_symtab_from
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol current_set
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol verify_area
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol intr_count
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol wake_up
Warning: kernel-module version mismatch
while this kernel is version 2.2.3
Nope, build failed! Resort to human intervention or mail support@vmware.com
Anyone else get this, or is it my freaky system?
While everybody is dinking around with it, find out if a networked computer can run a remote X window with Corel Draw 95 in it.
If it can, I can run Linux all the time, and have one dedicated Win95 application server. WinNT, eat your heart out.
Before we all get too psyched, check out their product info page, where they say
Virtual machines are patentable? Sounds like a possibly-great product with a marketing/legal department that wants to screw everybody thoroughly.
Seems they forgot to put it on the mirror.
Could someone please mirror it somewhere?
Flames on.
What is it with you people? If it doesn't have a GPL license it is evil. Maybe when you grow up and graduate from whatever high school you are in you will get a clue. The clue is that most of us need day jobs to support our involvment in GPL/OSS community.
As far as software patents, I agree that there have been some rather dubious software patents awarded. However, fundamentally I don't see much of a difference in a company investing a great amount of resources to develope a piece of hardware and trying to protect it vs developing a piece of software. If the technology is original and not obvious then I think a company has a right to protect its investment with copyrights and possibly patents.
Flames off.
If the patent holds, the product will be cloned that much faster. Although I just cannot see how such a patent could hold up.
It will be interesting to see what their business model is. I would not mind purchasing such a product, but if they follow standard practice, "upgrades" will be necessary and expensive. The last piece of this stuff I bought (MicroStation) requires libc5. I would have to pay full price just to get the same version for libc6. Thanks but no thanks.
Anyway, $300 is too much to pay for the ability to run software I really *don't* want to run anyway. Might be a good price for those of you who can bill to overhead, or better yet, customers.
does it do drect X 6.x?
windows 98?
force feedback joystick?
does it?
does it!?
If i dial up to my ISP in Linux will Win95/nt be able to use my ppp connection..??
-or-
Will i have to dial up in each os seperatly (which could be a problem being that i only have one modem)?
Anyone read the comment about the 2.2.3 driver not compiling? I have to say that I'm quite sorry for the guy, but I think that the errors generated are quite interresting. Are these guys (VMware) using drivers to bipass the kernel? I'm going to have fun with strace tonight ...
The site said no DirectDraw support - and no hardware acceleration - probably kinda crappy for games in it's current incarnation, but they are promising full directx support along with hardware acceleration at some point after release......
If its anything like I imagine the claim will be
then it'll be garbage. X86 JIT is _obvious_. Its
been kicked around on #linux a long time, its been
discussed on linux-kernel.
VMware also uses kernel modules for something, which is weird.It doesn't need to. Note that
because of this you should send any bug reports
to do with the Linux kernel running vmware to them
not me. I've had three reports so far from
people running vmware - probably not vmware bugs
but only they can debug a kernel with their code
loaded.
Double check your soft-link
The build will fail if it points to a linux
source tree that is different from your running
system.
Look, I'm impressed by their efforts - they deserve whatever money they wish to charge, this is an outstanding product.
It is spelled "license"
I do have a clue. Suppose a company develops a new process of heat treating metals, something totally new. It uses half the fuel and makes the product much more durable etc., That company would be entitled to a patent on this process.
Now suppose a company developes a new digital signal processing algorithm or perhaps a new encryption algorithm, something new and original. Why shouldn't this company be entitled to the same protection? I'm not talking about patenting XOR etc., I'm talking about something that is fundamentally new.
Both companies employed teams of scientist and invested large amounts of resources to develop these processes. Why should one company be treated differently under the law?
A copyright is not strong enough since it only protects a particular implementation, but this is not what the company developed. It developed a new process. The company should have the right to profit from its investments.
I'll agree that there have been abuses and that
software patents should be difficult to get. Perhaps they should even have a shorter lifespan, but I believe that there are legitimate cases to use them.
They claim to have a patent pending... but what?
Sounds like the DOSEMU folks will be getting a C&D letter if they get their patent. Is there anything about this product that isn't just a more compatible version of DOSEMU?
Aside from DOSEMU, there's WABI and that MacOS-on-Solaris program, a little project the NeXT guys did long ago, a dos virtual environment for the macintosh which Apple advertised in the late 80s, and many others, perhaps even older yet?
Did these guys really do anything new that isn't prior art? They'll probably get their patent, even if there is prior art all the way back into the 80s. If they use it to bully DOSEMU (which will be a major competitor if it improves) I hope they get a serious fight.
About the high $300 price, well, take a look at ARDI's Executor which originally appeared at $250 as I recall, but now sells $75 for linux. I doubt the linux market will bear a $300 price, but on the NT side folks are probably used to paying $300 for little add-ons many of which come for free with Linux.
Maybe they really did find a way to trick vm86 mode into some kind of vm386 mode.
;)
I wouldn't mind seeing all the system info when this thing is running (system registers, GDT, IDT, LDT, page tables, TSS, etc).
I dunno too much about this JIT stuff, but it seems like it would be too slow.
Bah. Support Wine and avoid the MS and VMware tax. If this thing is as cool under the hood as it is on the outside, MS is going to buy them out, fast. It would solve half of their Win2000 problems over night.
Instead of "This program runs best in MS-DOS mode", with vmware integrated, they could have "This program runs best in Win95 mode", or "This program runs best in WinNT mode", and dreadfully "This program runs best in Linux 2.2 mode".
Reverse-engineer it, now! Before it's too late!
Too bad it Errors with unknown CPUID Feature ...
Maybe it's not ready for Pentium III yet..
No, it's _not_ lower level than the OS. That is why it is a vitrual machine, and not an OS scheduler. This is also the same reason there are two versions-- one Linux and one NT. If it were lower level than your OS, it would load itself at boot time, and then load all of your OS's on top of it.
You don't have any clue what they've patented. It could be something new and innovative which they've spent lots of money to develope, and as a result have the right to patent. It also could be something that they have no right to patent like the virtual machine. Before you flame away, wait and see what they've patented.
$300 wouldn't buy you the case, harddrive, and motherboard for a PIII system.
Their own FAQ mentions IBM's ancient VM/390. I had independently developed extremely similar functionality on an SMP UNIX box, then (coincidence #1) went to work for one of the original VM designers, then (coincidence #2) married someone whose father knew that same designer very well and was familiar with his work. The moral of the story is that this idea is old enough for the originators to've had grandchildren. ;-)
I wish I'd thought of doing it myself for Linux or NT at the time. No, wait. Neither existed at the time, or maybe NT did but certainly nobody took either one seriously.
That said, kudos to those guys for getting it to work. It's a tough thing to do. I wonder a little bit about shipping their own BIOS (that's what the FAQ says) but I'm sure they have their reasons.
i found out that if it doesnt see the boot image for linux then lilo freaks out and gives lots of numbers like your seeing. you prolly need a boot disk and do some configuring of lilo. or if you wanna redo it. load up dos (ew) and do a fdisk /mbr
doobman
too lazy to log in
DOSEMU is an emulator. This is a virtual machine. There is a difference.
This vm does basically what OS/2 does with DOS/Windows programs, by booting a virtual machine in hardware. Some things probably are emulated (shared devices), but it's actually running in a separate virtual machine.
They're not trying to sell it to Slashdot Anonymous Cowards, silly boy. They're selling it to businesses (like the one I work at) who've made a significant investment in one OS (like Windows) but want to reap the benefits of another OS (like Linux).
I think it's a great deal for our small (10 person) business. Don't think of it as $300 for Windows. Think of it as $300 for adding Linux capabilities to Windows, and that's a damn good deal if you look at it that way.
I just upgraded my machine. I bought a K6-2/350, a super socket 7 motherboard, and 256MB RAM for $400. If I had to replace the case, that'd run another $50.
The real cost in IT today is the software. People've made huge investments in Windoze. The way I look at it is, what VMWare lets you do is gain stuff like the Coda filesystem, Linux development and administration tools, and Linux reliability under Windoze. I'd sure as hell pay $300 for that.
It dies with an error.
Ober
Did nobody else notice that they tout it as being
"patent pending"? This is completely at odds with
our community. There is no use supporting somebody like this or running their proprietary software.
-- John Goerzen
jgoerzen@complete.org
Last year we had a customer go belly up and .5 Million
didn't ship a X11 interface to its hardware.
Company 2 bought company 1 and wanted
to finish the X11 app. Company 1 had a Win16
version so we were trying to run SoftPC on HP-UX
to run the Win16 app. SoftPC ran and loaded Win95
but was dreadfully slow. The point is, this looks
like what I installed on the HP-UX system. Did
they notice a market and change the name to make
it sound new?
Locutus
If I have an unusual device (i.e. one not supported by the BIOS) with drivers for only one of the OSes I'm using, does that mean I can only access that device from within that OS? From the issues raised with (thoroughly barfable) "WinModems" and such, it sounds like the answer is yes.
Even better: let's say I have drivers for both Linux and NT. These drivers were probably written with the assumption that only one driver instance was associated with the device. I'll bet that for a lot of devices having another driver on another OS twiddling the same registers and using the same resources is going to suck BIG TIME. That's _certainly_ the case for most of the drivers I've ever worked on, and I doubt my experience is all that anomalous. Double ick.
Yep, scsi emulation does not work with this thing -- I had to disable scsi emu on my regular cd drive to test it out, and it /is/ very cool. I wonder if they have ide emu for scsi devices for those of us with all scsi systems.
Your a Dork.
Applications BAD!
We just NEED OS!.
This thing basically seems like a commercial version of BOCHS that is much farther along in development. BOCHS can (with enough fiddling) boot Win95 and things like that but it's slow as hell. This seemed to actually be usable. Nice job. But not worth $300. I think if it stays at that price someone's going to end up just pirating it.
Someone is going to pirate it even if it only costs 1 dollar.
The X server is just the Xfree86 SVGA server patched to support DGA 1.1 ...dropped it in, works just fine. Haven't seen any speed difference, but at least it doesn't complain about DGA 1.1 not being supported any more. I've got the latest Xfree86, too, so even with 3.3.3.3.3.3.1.1.1 (or whatever the latest version is) you should use the new server.
--ryan.
...anyone else lose control of their mouse in full screen mode? The cursor is there, it just won't move until I switch back to windowed mode.
Keyboard (and guest OS) still work full screen.
--ryan.
Interix (www.interix.com) have something similar to run Unix/Linux apps on NT.
-Me.
well, it's not yet as good as it could be. but this is really something we've been waiting for loooong time. virtual pc on mac runs windows (or whatever) still faster and more stable.
now i can backup my mobile phone without booting to windows.
well, linux client for nokia communicator would be nice, but those damn bosses always have too much work for me, can't find time to do it myself. at least they promised to buy vmware for me. hope it will be worth $300.
I think $150-$200 is much more reasonable for home use and $300 is fine for commercial use.
:)
I'm just hoping that they have a student version. Maybe $100?
We'll just have to wait to see what they finally decided on for pricing structurs.
Man, running my virtual PC over VNC on 10base is faster than this...
They need to do s'more optimizin...
Pretty good for a beta tho. Keep up the good work, though. I'll buy it if it's faster.
They do have a student version for $99, I think the FAQ mentioned it. ;)
Yeah, but when winblows crashes, down goes Linux. ideally the best thing would be to do the other way round. Install Linux, put the virtual machine on. Run Word or whatever through the virtual machine on Linux. Whenever windows crashes, just kill it, and restart it. The only thing keeping Linux from near perfection, is all those windows applications......
Solution:
- install vmware's x server.
- Install vmware-tools.exe in the win95 virtual machine.
This will get you higher resolutions, MUCH faster video, and mouse in full screen mode.
I can imagine...
It didn't have a module for my 2.0.34 kernel, and trying to make one using their driver source failed, as it wouldn't make for 2.0.34.
Probably not miss much anyway -- still need a valid license for a copy of Win95/98 || NT && either installed.
Yeah, it's a bit slow, but installing the vmware X server and vmware tools sped things up quite a bit on this box. Anyone have an extra 128 SDRAM laying around? 64 isn't enough.
Bummer here too! :/
;)
I'm running kernel 2.2.1 with dual PII's, anyone else having probs with SMP?
Funny thing is with all the errors, it seems to stil build, although when I try to execute it, I get a command not found even though it has execute permissions.
All you guys are making me drool, I want to get this thing to work!
Student discount would be soooo cool.
Right, that's what I meant. With the reliability of Linux and free scripting/remote admin tools, and Windows running on top of that, you've got a pretty nice platform.
This is awesome: you can run totally different
OSs' on one machine....
Imagine: Redhat AND Debian!! Or FreeBSD AND
OpenBSD! No matter they have nothing in common,
it will work!
w3rd d00dz!
bochs is an emulator, vmware isn't
Does this thing run Office-97? What speed can one expect using a PII-266 / 64 mb RAM?
// Simon
Since when was RedHat and Debian two different OSs'
Bochs is commercial software, too.
It's just licenced as shareware and available as sourcecode.
IMHO VNC is slower than win95 running in a vmware box. Besides, at $99 for the student version it's a very attractive value for me at least. I don't WANT a million machines cluttering my room. In fact, I wish I could get rid of the one I have in here now and just use a quiet laptop.. unfortunately the laptop isn't quite as powerful. *shrug*
You're running it on at least a PII-266 and using the virtual disk filesystem? This is slow on my PPro-150 but flies on my PII-266 at work. I think they've done an excellent job.
You are the enemy.
please leave.
Well, call me dumb, but after spending hours last night having fun with this incredible software, I VNC'd in to my home system from work this morning. Launched VMware/NT4, clicked on the boot screen, and now I've lost control of that VNC session. Of course, only now do I realize that the VM is using the keyboard and mouse *at my home*. My firewall prevents me from telnetting to the box or doing anything other than VNC to it, so it's stuck until I get home. *sigh*
http://jcs.jsteintech.com/vmware
yes win98 is slow. NT SERVEr is much faster. I am sure NTWS will have similar result
Why did it take so long for X86?
BOCHS can be a vibrator for all I care. If it accomplishes the mission of allowing me to run different OS's in a virtual machine under Linux without rebooting I couldn't care less. AFAIK BOCHS provides a similar kind of virtual machine interface to the OS's as vmware does.
$300 is a day's pay for me. If you've graduated with a techie type degree and can't afford VMWare at the full price, consider killing yourself.
I had the same problem. My hardware is an AMD k6-2 350 mhz running RH Linux 5.1.
/D:MSCD000 /I:0
*** VMWare internal monitor error ***
NOT_IMPLEMENTED at 0x53435
During the Win95 splash screen.
Going through step-by-step confirmation during booting of Win95 results in this error occurring after I acknowledge:
DEVICE=C:\DEV\ATAPI_CD.SYS
Any suggestions? Is this how the fabled AMD K6 + Win95 bug shows it's ugly head?
-cow
Can anyone explain how to get the CD-ROM to work?
I've loaded an ATAPI CD-ROM driver and it recognizes that, and MSCDEX loads fine. I can switch to the CD-ROM drive letter, but when I try to actually read the CD-ROM, it locks up.
Also, does anyone know how to setup networking under DOS? I can't find anything in the documentation that tells me what the IRQ and base address is of the virtual ethernet adapter.
Thanks in advance.
Too lazy to set up an account...
Uh huh. If you're getting stuff that way, why the hell would you actually *pay* $300 for VMWare, too? If you're just going to steal everything, VMWare is still going to be cheaper.
--
Jason Eric Pierce
I have a similar problem. The CD drive works fine for example installing Red Hat however when I load the ATAPI drivers and MSCDEX in dos then it takes either a very long time to read the drive or it can't read it at all.
;)
;)
If anybody has a solution to this I'd be interested too
Regards,
Your favourite Anon Coward
Well LILO's boot sector needs to load the LILO core code from where the /boot directory was located when you ran /sbin/lilo.
/boot directory, or placing the /boot directory on your FAT partition.
So you need to have at least read-only access to that partition as well as the one you're trying to boot.
Use the make-saferawdisk.pl script that came with VMWare to create the disk description file rather than editing it by hand.
Other solutions include mounting a special boot partion as the
// Thomas Horsten
A good number of the cd-rom "operation not supported" things are just using the wrong cdrom drivers. From a win95 osr2 bootdisk choose the first option than the last (It's the OAK driver).
Reload this kid's screenshots page a lot.
:-)
Rather than downgrading Glibc, just remove the "#include " line in driver.c. It worked for me. Credit goes to another thread where some kind fellow posted patches, and I just skimmed through them and found this...
Hmmph.
First I just wanted to say that you are my new hero :) Anyhow the site is dead beyond any comprehension... I don't suppose you could put that liscense key up if you still remember it? The important thing tho, can I play half life? :) :)
Thanks SO much
No, you can't move windows outside the box.
Winmodems won't work; You connect with the linux dialer and the VM's adapter uses it (it doesn't go in the other direction).
The licence (which is how they choose to apply their COPYRIGHT) is fine.
A software patent (which has nothing to do w/ the licence or copyright) prevents other folks from independantly developing anything using the same technique. THIS is evil (if you question this, read some LPF publications for a very good explanation of why).
Get a clue before you flame.
It's lower level than the OS, so of course it can do DX6 and Win98 -- and it'll be able to run DX7 and W2K every bit as well when they come out.
Not so sure 'bout the joystick, though.
I was referring to the target OS.
Posted by stodge:
I wonder how it compares to Win 9x for performance. In particular Office, Quicken and games. Also I wonder how good the Direct X (6.1?) support is. I imagine a lot of people only use Windows for games, finance and Office. I know there are alternatives on Linux for Office and finance, but IMHO they're not as good. If someone has installed this thing, please post info on running games.
The closest open-source equivalent would be "Bochs", which you can find at freshmeat.net.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
- Is closed-source
- Won't run OS/2
- Doesn't work with mcopy or traditional disk images/disk tools
$300 is just way too much. I don't need it that bad.And it's not that I can't necessarily afford to spend $300. It's just that it's not *worth* $300, IMO.
If it can run Corel Draw reasonably well I'll reformat my Windows box tonight!
Any word on performance? How does this thing actually work (does it interpret the machine code or execute it somehow)?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Also, you can add your regular login to the "disk" group, as they suggest, to be able to not run it as root. Obviously, you can play with the perms any way you see fit...
You can sort of run Linux from the same partition as the host OS, but you *must* not mount any shared partitions read/write. There may be some issues with Linux in the VM getting confused by the Linux host changing the filesystem, but it works OK for me... Having both Linux's writing to the same partition would be disastrous, though.
It doesn't look like the guest OS gets to play directly with the hardware; instead, it is emulated and native drivers are used. Doing it this way avoids conflict between the two drivers, but it also means that you can't use drivers in the guest OS to access hardware that the host OS doesn't support.
I find it strange that some OS's such as Beos and OS/2 are not supported. If they really provide a clean well-defined virtual machine, every x86 operating system should run in it, no?
Overall, it think it's good that it's so expensive. Suits don't mind paying through the nose, and the rest of us should support free and non-patented technologies anyway.
--
I wish they did. Running Warp 4 under Linux would be *too* cool. :-) Then I *could* use the WPS on a Linux box!! :-)
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeOS, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
But it's lower level than the guest OS, which is what matters here.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I don't see why it shouldn't support BeOS, since it works (as far as I can tell) by emulating computer hardware rather than software. You just wouldn't get the 'snazzier' features (like video acceleration through their custom drivers)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
It won't have any effect on wine, they're different types of programs with different goals and different strengths. It might actually help since the Wine DirectX developers can now set up a virtual Linux machine to test on (so if X falls over they can keep going) ;-)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Hmm, it worked for me. I got this one time though, try doing make clean and deleting the include files (linux/modversions.h and another one) that the makefile added.
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
After all the trouble I went to, booting Win95 gives me the logo screen, and then vmware dies with 'NOT_IMPLEMENTED'. I tried emailing what it asked for to support@vmware.com and got back a procmail error. Heh. Cute idea, but totally broken as far as I can tell if it doesn't even survive the boot process. (if I sound a little critical it's because I spent all afternoon fighting with it, trying to get it to boot)
OTOH, booting the Debian install disk under Debian was kinda fun for a few seconds.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Do you have another drive installed that vmware can't see? LILO tries to access all drives with images on startup and dies noisily (with 01010101010101) if one is missing.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
It's time to go back to basic sources. The United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, states:
(Emphasis added---see your local social contract for other countries.)It's not about an inventor's ownership---there is no ownership of ideas, nor even any limits on use except as society has decided it's to its advantage to allow such.
The advantage posited is that if society offers remuneration to those who come up with new ideas, we'll get more such ideas, and civilization will advance that much more rapidly. (I'm all in favor of penicillin and contact lenses, myself.) The remuneration is in the form of a monopoly on use of the idea (for a limited time), allowing the thinker to make money on it before others get a shot at copying it.
This was a Good Thing for ideas that took years of sweat, tons of metal, and a lot of limited and expensive resources to develop, like, say, Bessemer furnaces, safety pins, and leading-shoe brakes. If the idea wouldn't be implemented without a pay-back for the thinker, society was less likely to reap its benefits. So, we say (for patents) ``Here, tell us what your idea is, document it for all to see, and in return for that openness we'll help you make money from it---not because you have any ownership of an idea, but because we'll get the benefit of having it sooner, and letting other thinkers build on it.''
The vital concept here is that patents are for the good of society, not the person with the idea. If an idea is most likely going to be developed anyway, there's no social benefit to limit use of it. Further, software is one of the most likely areas for ideas to be developed without monopoly, simply because coding is cheap, attracts thousands (millions?) of people, and is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. If one hacker doesn't generate a given idea, there'll be another one along in a minute.
Unfortunately, over the decades, people got (remained?) greedy, and specialized enough to have never studied their own history, and so began to think that an idea, of all things, could have an owner, and that it was their right to have a monopoly and control access to the idea.
Look back on the development of software: in the past 60 years is there any evidence that its progress has been hampered by people afraid to develop ideas for lack of protection? Hah! Never in the history of technology has a field advanced so rapidly or been so fecund, and most of it has been due to the open availability of ideas. Until the 1980s no one could patent software, and copyright seemed to work quite nicely, thank you. Now, unfortunately, we have people who think that because they spent a year or two on an idea, they should be allowed to prohibit anyone else from using the idea, even though it's hardly novel, or even notably hard---tedious in reducing to a useful form, but no more.
So, someone building a virtual machine (which IBM made mega-bucks on in the '60s and '70s [and may be still, for all I know]) cannot be allowed to say ``I'm the only person who can use this idea for the next 17 years'' (or is it up to 20 now?) when the same idea has occurrred to anyone who's written an emulator.
Applying protection to ideas that would be developed anyway is a net loss (it slows, not speeds technical advances) and thus is not intended by patent law. For more background and analysis, check out the League for Programming Freedom's web site, and remember---you can't own an idea, and you can't even limit its use unless society thinks it'll get something back for allowing such limits.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
"a few things: vmware doesn't run off of your actual windows partition, it makes a "virtual disk drive" (basically a really big file called win95.dsk or something) for you."
I wonder if it's possible to make your own image of your existing hard drive using dd if=/dev/hd? of=/win95.dsk
A guy can dream, can't he?
I tried BeOS R4.0 (I have a 4.1 beta at home that I haven't tried yet, but don't expect any different results). The floppy boots up to "Examining disks..." then displays the empty "Rescan for boot volumes" screen. No matter how many times I choose "rescan", it never finds the Be CD-ROM. If I hold down F1 while booting and check the BeOS debugging that comes out of COM1 (which VMWare conveniently lets me redirect to a file), I see:
/vmware/BeOS/BeOS.dsk (433/15/63)
cam_load_modules...
cam: attempting to load 'busses/scsi/buslogic/v1' (internal)
buslogic: sim_install()
buslogic: no controller found
cam: module 'busses/scsi/buslogic/v1' cannot be loaded
cam: attempting to load 'busses/scsi/aic78xx/v1' (internal)
adaptec: sim_install()
adaptec: no controller found
cam: module 'busses/scsi/aic78xx/v1' cannot be loaded
cam: attempting to load 'busses/scsi/53c8xx/v1' (internal)
symbios: sim_install()
symbios: no controller found
cam: module 'busses/scsi/53c8xx/v1' cannot be loaded
Creating startup devices...
flo_init: problem creating cylinder buffer area
IDE PCI -- find_devices: intel 82371AB (PIIX4) chipset
IDE PCI -- find_devices: controller supports DMA
IDE PCI -- create_prd_table_area: couldn't create dma table area
IDE PCI -- find_devices: disabled dma
IDE PCI -- create_prd_table_area: couldn't create dma table area
IDE PCI -- find_devices: disabled dma
IDE -- send_ata: drive select failed no device
IDE -- send_ata: drive select failed no device
IDE PCI -- find_devices: intel 82371AB (PIIX4) chipset
IDE PCI -- find_devices: controller supports DMA
IDE PCI -- create_prd_table_area: couldn't create dma table area
IDE PCI -- find_devices: disabled dma
IDE PCI -- create_prd_table_area: couldn't create dma table area
IDE PCI -- find_devices: disabled dma
IDE -- send_ata: drive select failed no device
IDE -- send_ata: drive select failed no device
cam: B_MODULE_INIT
---> publish_devices_dsk has no devices
and the VMWare log file says:
Mar 15 16:26:22: Booting Virtual Machine
Mar 15 16:26:22:
Mar 15 16:27:03: VIDE: (0x1F0) OUTB Cmd 0xA1, Erroring Invalid ATA on drive 0
Mar 15 16:27:38: DISK: ROOT COWDisk
Mar 15 16:27:41:
MainPowerOff-- Shutting down devices
I'll send this info to VMWare and see what they have to say. If anyone at Be sees this message and would like to comment, that would be cool too. I *will* buy this program if it supports BeOS. Being able to keep up with the latest BeOS happenings without having to leave the comfort of Linux is well worth $300 to me. Of course, even without BeOS support, I may still buy VMWare, it's just that cool!
-Jake
--
Jake
Hmm, you probably won't be able to run Cakewalk considering it doesn't support MIDI yet.
-Jake
--
Jake
NT4 installed in about 10 minutes and flies in VMware, while the Win98 install is taking *forever* (60 minutes!). My guess is that the emulator, like the Pentium Pro, is far better at running 32-bit code than 16-bit...
-Jake
--
Jake
500 Server Error
The hard transfer limit for this user has been reached
This is quite a bit of code... Something new? Probably not, but its pretty slick none the less. Very quick on here, Win98 and Win95 installed without a hitch, both seem to work fine, all the apps I've tried have worked.
There's some wierd little bugs with the mouse cursor in X when running their device drivers under Windows... my netscape window is overlapping the VMware one right now, if I put the mouse in the window its on the windows desktop until I pull it completely out of the partially hidden VMWare window, then it appears on top of netscape.
Everything else seems to work... $300 is kind of pricey considering I can buy a new PC for a bit more than that, but if I can get it to run Cakewalk, I might even spend $300...
I bet they'd sell a lot of them to people who want to run Linux primarily but need Win95 for some various things, if it was a bit cheaper. $150 seems more reasonable given the $399 cost of those new E-Machine PC's.
Hehe, that's also the only reason I keep a win98 partition on my system. Unfortunately I don't think DVD will work wwith VMWare, at least not with this beta version. It's supports CDROM only I think (via a NECVmware sort of driver, internally). I've also not seen any ioport region protection/visibility configurations so I doubt you'll get to the MPEG decoder card...
:)
C'mon SIGMA! Linux driver, pleeaaase
-Adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Installing the vmware-tools made all the difference for me. I'ts now running acceptibly in a 1152x900 window off a virtual hardisk..
-Adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
They got slashdotted pretty damn quick- about 10 or so minutes- anyone got access to set up mirrors (or does the licensing of the beta disallow that sort of distribution?)?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Im getting that same error. I use 2.2.3 on what used to be redhat. I'll see if i can find a fix and then post it. If anyone else finds a fix please post it.
I have to return some videotapes...
when i try to load the module it makes i get this:
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol misc_deregister
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol __wake_up
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol __generic_copy_from_user
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol vsprintf
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol kmalloc
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol __get_free_pages
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol local_bh_count
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol panic
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol free_pages
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol do_gettimeofday
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol local_irq_count
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol del_timer
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol __pollwait
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol kfree
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol misc_register
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol mem_map
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol sprintf
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol jiffies
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol printk
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol add_timer
/tmp/vmware-tmp/vmmon-up-2.2.3: unresolved symbol __generic_copy_to_user
I have to return some videotapes...
Beware! The DotSlash(TM) effect!!
*grin*
We should all donate massive massive harddrives so that way rob can mirror a site before posting it :-)
Ok... Atleast enough room to mirror the starwars trailers.
Mike
derGott
"It takes 42 muscles to frown, but it only takes 4 to pull the trigger of a finly tuned sniper rifle."
Is it just me, or has someone who is running the SCSI-over-IDE kernel setup had problems getting this to be able to access the cdroms?
First I was getting this error:
PowerOn
CDROM: Verify Ioctl '/dev/cdrw' failed: 'No Medium Found'
So then on the off chance that it needed a cd in the drive, I put one in....
PowerOn
CDROM: Verify Ioctl '/dev/cdrw' failed: 'Operation not supported'
I'm guessing it's because of the IDE-SCSI setup I have going on.
In what way is Interix, a product that provides a UNIX-compatible environment under NT, letting you compile source code for UNIX applications and run the resulting binaries under NT, "similar" to something that provides a virtual machine in which you can run a complete foreign operating system's binary code, including kernel-mode code?
(No, you can't run binaries from a UNIX-flavored system under Interix; the Interix FAQ says as much in the section "The INTERIX Environment":
)vmnet is there to provide the networking interface... I suppose you could use the ethertap device to get a similar setup, but they have bridging/private network/routed network in one.
From a quick readthrough, looks like their vmmon kernel module is largly to allow linux to run in inside itself... lots of vmLinux structures allocated. Anyway, it's a good read.
--DanI'm downloading it right now, but in the meantime, does anyone know if it supports DVD drives? I don't have a MPEG2 decoder code, so right now I have to reboot to Win98 to do software DVD decoding. It would be great if this worked in linux.
Surely you jest?
Are you one of these lucky people who lives a 25-hour 8-day week?
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Especially 4.0 or 4.1?
What happens when you do?
[ReidNews]
$300 is about what it will cost me to upgrade my hardware, and I could never afford to spend that for any software program. Large businesses or corporations that use it could, and probably would though. They mention there might be a student discount on their FAQ sheet, perhaps there's still hope.
They could make the big money off the big guys, and just let us individuals 'bug test' it for a small fee, like $100 bucks or so.
It'd certainly become far more widespread then...
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
Go follow the link... they have a mirror link on the "Hard Limit Reached" notice! ;)
./ that server too!
Let's
The 2.2.1 module included with the program was compiled with modversions, whereas the 2.0.32 one wasn't. So, I tried compiling my own module. Well, it checked for kernel 2.1, but that meant it thought 2.2 was 2.0. I have patched it, and now, it compiled in insmod was able to complete. I need to do some more testing, to make sure it doesn't bring down my box, and clean up the patch, before I release my mods.
http://mirror.novare.net/~adam/vmware/
VM are old. A VM letting a OS run in top of another OS is not a new idea. So...What's new?
I have to say that it's nice to see it running, but let's call things by it's name.
I'm waiting for the BeOS version...should I sit down?
Yeah, I have networking running on a virtual NT4 on RH5.2 + kernel 2.2.1 on a dual P-II 400. It got an address from my DHCP server and just ran. I even installed the Novell client software, and now I can get to all my company's production servers. I installed Delphi 4 on the NT4 virtual box, and I can't really notice a performance difference between this and Delphi running on my PII-300 notebook. The only thing is that window updates are a bit slow sometimes. It seems quite stable, too--I have yet to see it fail in any way.
Also, as to the idea that $300 is too much--it depends on who they're targeting. In my case, anything under $500 my boss can and will sign for if it seems cool. I wouldn't pay $300 for it personally, but it's chump change to any reasonable IT department. At least until you start trying to deploy it to hundreds of desktops.
Even then, I could justify $30,000 on support costs for 100 machines if I could claim noticeable stability improvements. Of course, I can't in this case, because a desktop user running Windows on real hardware is not going to improve stability by running Windows on virtual hardware. Sure, Linux keeps running underneath, but so what?
I'll certainly get a copy for myself, though...
-Graham
Hm.. pretty cool, but $300 USD.
I just put a Celeron300A/BX98/65MB/32xCDROM system together for $400. Canadian, that's about $275 US.
I can Install w95/98/NT/Lunux/Solaris/OS2. Whatever.
I even use VNC and xWin32 to be able to get at either OS. It's great!
as cool as their software is, they're trying to patent it, which is stupid.
the idea of virtual machines is ancient. sub-OS-level virtual machines occured to me, like probably every other programmer worth a dime, when i was about seventeen.
i even had my 386 dual-booting DOS using someone else's (free) software.
just a little IP MASQ and Routing magic and i bet it would work. I cant test it right now as i am unable to get vwware working (dosnt like my libc5 x libs *i think*)
This thing sucks!! It hard locks my box everytime no matter how I configure it. I can't even telnet in from another box.
Guess I'll wait for the next beta.
One By One The Penguins Steal My Sanity
I'm getting the same problem.
I'm running 2.2.3 on a debian system.
What is the remedy?
Well, how bout you post your .cfg so those of us that use ide-scsi can look at it??? Kinda sucks to reboot with an IDE kernel to use this, might as well type win95 at the boot prompt... Maybe I'll put just the CD-RW on ide-scsi...
ln -s /usr/src/include/asm-i386 /usr/include/asm /usr/src/include/linux /usr/include/linux
ln -s
And then install and compile...
Triboot is easy. I've got triboot W98/Linux/BeOS at home right now. I've had as much as pentaboot (5 OSes) on one machine.
Graf in England - and I really don't suck
Yeah that's it. Get a firm grasp on something besides your dick and then realize Microsoft would never be interested in something as scummy as Linux.
/. today that read: "Scientsts known the Sun will fail.. but when it does you're Penguin Computing systems will still be running". I finally realized what was so unique about Linux. It's the masses of twits and arrogance that surrounds Linux. Get over it. It's just a fucking kernel, and a rather average one at that.
I saw an ad on
The revolution will be mocked
I got the same errors as Jake for BeOS... both with a virtual disk and a previously installed version in /dev/hdc.
WinNT worked fine tho...
http://blevins.simplenet.com/vmware.jpg
I tried to install it on my laptop which has a DVD drive. It is not able to recognize it even as a CDROM drive.
I tried to install win98 and the install process was painfully slow. Now admittedly I don't have a screamer of a machine, but I was surprise how slow the install went. I guess I'll have to try NTWS.
you too!!
1. linux
2. beos 3
3. win95
4. winnt4
5. beos 4
6. os/2
i consider beos3 and 4 seperate since i like beos. i also have a win3.1 partition but i didn't put that down since win95 crap pretty much makes up for it
.vader
' god damn this is one wacky game show ' ~ jay in mallrats
I guess we'll have to wait for some mirrors. I've been looking forward to this for quite a while. Please, make the bad Bill go away :)
I was referring to the freedom of being able to stay in Linux and not having to reboot everytime I want to run one or two specialized apps Wine dies on. Like you said, this increases reliance on Windows. It will have to do in the meantime though.
I haven't been able to download it yet, so I wanted to ask if it is possible to grab a window(eg. the winamp playlist) and move it outside the box.
Also, if I connect to the internet using the windows dialer will I be able to use the internet on liunx at the same time? will a winmodem work then?
Thank god for DHCP. I'm using up the whole subnet by myself.
Anyone know what are the issues are with Beos and SCO?
Almost time to fire up the nes and atari emlators and do a screenshot.
How many unqiue OS's can YOU run?
- wilkinsm
I installed vmware on my Linux box...it's an SMP dual PII 266 system...one processor for each OS...that ROCKS! in full screen mode, there isn't even any refresh problem (in a window, it runs sort of slow because of refresh rates). All I have to say is this thing rocks.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
I doubt that will work. A) It uses DGA to improve video access, which I'm fairly certain doesn't run remotely. B) The performance isn't that great. It's useable (w/ a pII-300) but not that useable.
-matt
Ah well, I didn't really have any NT software to run (other than Rational Visual Test ;p). I love the virginal feel of a system with two partitions: one e2fs and one swap.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Is this the solution I have been looking for? I have been really annoyed at having to boot NT just to do stupid homework stuff. Perhaps I can now stay in linux and still use the few windows apps I need... If this was free, might it have a negative effect on wine?
-Cheetah
Whoa!!!
Did anyone see that joke go by?
Some geeks tend to be so literal minded.
Anyone know if an Open Source solution similar to what VMWare has done would be feasible (not just technically, but also legally). Is any project similar to it underway?
-Jamin P. Gray
-------------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
I downloaded it. I installed it. So far I can run all the crap the big shots want me to run. works for me...
I'm sure that violates a whole lot of licenses. Runing a virtual machine is the same as running a real one, when it comes to the lawyers.
Holy Wah! The post's been up there for about 10 minutes and the place is slashdotted already... I can't even get teh main page... Anyone know of any other sources for it?
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
It works running with a remote X server. I just did it a little while ago... I must admit, it is very nice... BIG time bandwidth hog, though... got to watch the hub(on 10baseT, going through the school's entire network) go up to about85% or more everytime I moved the mouse...Still pretty cool though... I had it running the X server on an Ultrasparc 10, with VMWare running on my Pentium 200 MMX. The performance was not great, but some of that was from my end up the system. I need to do some optimizing for it, I think... Still very interesting, though, very interesting. I think I just have to say, I like it. I like it a lot. A very nice program, fun to play with, and it keeps me from rebooting sometimes too.
Darmox
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
No offense, but unless you have a firm grasp on exactly how this program works in its entiriety (sp)? I don't think you can say that it doesn't need kernel modules.
You can also get the software from www2.vmware.com but most of the links will need to be changed manually to www2 (they point to www.vmware.com)
The license key I got expires April 15. Not sure if it's a fixed date or a one month period after license request though.
This one isn't /.'d yet.
Blech. Signatures.
Triboot? Dang. I've got Linux, Solaris, UnixWare, OpenStep, FreeBSD, and a couple different DOS's & Windows systems all installed on this box. The easiest way to do this is to install a removable drive, whatever kind you like, as your first hard drive, and use a SCSI controller that lets you select whether you want to boot from the removable or not. Then you just install whatever you need to boot each system plus whatever else you want (root/main partition) on a removable disk and use your fixed disks for extra storage. You can also, of course, turn off the removable boot option any time you want and just boot whatever system you use most off a fixed disk.
$300. Ouch. I'm not cheap, I'm just poor. If it was half that much I'd probably get it and just not eat for a couple days, but I think I'm going to pass on this for now.
Still, anything that can help Linux swallow Windows & its installed base is a good thing.
One thought though.. when will they have a vmware for NT .. to allow folk to run linux apps *grin* (run.. duck ... hide). Shri
excellent.... considering that there is no way I can get some of my corporate apps to run on Linux (don't get me started on this, many of them are even non MS apps) it would be cool to run Linux apps, if nothing else, as a "isnt this so cool" item.
Sure you can. You can say any damn thing you want. Welcome to the new world, my friend.
Anyway, it "shouldn't" need any kernel modules. I can see why they'd use some though.. Probably to integrate the networking/sound/other device access into the kernel, so that the VMware application doesn't have to play nice and share with the other apps unless it wants to. But, if it works okay, big deal. Also, by using a module they probably got some definite speed improvements. Oh well oh well
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I got nothing here.. The drive only compiles fine, then the vmnet fails a miserable-death.. help! Redhat running with 2.2.3
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The problem was that I had glibc 2.1 on my box. Removed that and put glibc 2.0 back on and it compiled perfectly!
yes, i used redhat rpms. I know, i feel like less of a man for it, but hey.. at least it worked.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
I downloaded it just before 1AM, and I'm still up. /dev/hda. When I press the "Power on" button, I get the "LILO" prompt, and I select my Win95 image!
This vmware is really amazing. I installed it, specified to boot on my
It's really slow for the moment, since it runs a lot of debugging code as well, but on my 233 chip,
I can boot Win95 with WinAmp and it works!
That's soooooooo incredible! Version 0.1.. imagine what version 1.0 will be like!
It _does_ work with your actual windows partition.
But you have to edit the settings manually, and put:
# virtual hard disk on primary master
ide0:0.present = TRUE
ide0:0.fileName = "/dev/hda"
ide0:0.mode = persistent
It depends on your license file! =)
Mine expires in one month.. I hope we can download another license after that!
vmware creates a fake AMD Lance network card, and it binds it to a /dev/vmnet1 device on your Linux system.
So you dial under Linux and either use a second IP for windows or use IP masquerading.
Pretty neat!
I had a similar problem. It refuses to power on if the CD-ROM is enabled with SCSI emulation.
Probably something I have overlooked.
The way I see it, you *could* dial with Windows, install a proxy server on it, and use the vmnet1 device in Linux.
;)
Yeah, it would be unreliable, but I hate to say something is impossible
Winmodems will probably not work, anyways, they suck. But I kinda like Lucent LT PCI Winmodems, and I'd like to see someone test it...
I have (what used to be) Caldera OpenLinux with 2.2.3 here and it works.
Check if you have module support in your kernel,
then do:
make dep;make clean;make;make modules; make install_modules; make install; reboot
And then do a `depmod -a` to make sure all module dependencies are okay.
YMMV
I worked on an old VM/386 which basically serverd
as a Windows (16/32) application server for an ethernet. It used really funky 5-pair UTP and
needed special NIC's in the server. A totaly
pain in the ass to support. I haven't used VMWare
yet but it sounds like a step closer to something practical and useable
I just pulled this from their FAQ at:
Very cool product but I can't see paying $300 for it. To run windows? Windows doesn't cost that much.
http://www2.vmware.com/products/productfaq.html
When will VMware become available?
The initial VMware product comes in two flavors, based on the operating system running native on the PC. These two versions are VMware for Linux and VMware for Windows NT. A beta release of VMware for Linux will be available on or about March 15, 1999. Commercial release of VMware for Linux is planned for May, approximately 60 days later. The beta release of VMware for Windows NT is scheduled for mid-April, with commercial release expected in June (approximately 60 days later).
What is the price?
Each flavor of the product has a list price of $299.00 U.S.
Wish I was a better coder.... :-7
;-)
Then I'd start an OSS project to accomplish a VM.
Because... I've tried out the vmware VM and it already rocks. "Never ask a geek why..."
Speaking of which... anyone ever wondered about setting up a general "request" site for OSS projects? A site where you could put up ideas or like for projects to be picked by bored coders.
A site where professors, teachers and students could go and pick a project or some teammembers for a not yet started project.
Is that an idea?
Best regards,
Steen Suder
Best regards,
Steen Suder
-- for email: send to
That's what you get for not running your Web server on a Tandy.
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
$300 will get you a PIII 500 computer with all the fixins at that little computer shop on 115th Street.
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
Joke? I was referring to the same place where you can get the $15 Rolex watches. Where's the joke?
--
Beef
"Raging Moderate" of the
Did tou install the corect video drivers? On my k6/166 it cooks. Get the vmware tools.
Have you checked out Zoid.com yet? Zoid.com
Hmm. How reasonable is it to set up a triboot?
kmj
kmj
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
Okay... that's a damned good idea, and once /dev/hda,
I figured out how to direct it to my
now it seems as if LILO is giving me some damn
trouble? Anyone ever have LILO scroll and
unending loop of #'s across the screen? In this
case it is 07's?
As soon as some one can post a mirror address i'd be glad to put it on 2 sites of mine to distribute this ./ effect around a bit :)
-- Chris Chabot
"I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
I was very impressed with it.... it's fast and works fine without crashes. the only drawback is the price. That beta is a 30 days license only.
Price is $299
buy the student ver then... they thought about us poor student geeks
its a pc emulator...
and with that CPU you can expect a very fast emulating IF you install vmware-tools.exe
This won't make "bad Bill" go away! It will allow anyone to code for a poorly designed closed-source OS, and eliminate any need for porting to linux to reach the linux userbase.
Not that it isn't an incredible piece of software, mind you.
*Our* community?
:)
:-)
I think that is a bit overgeneral, judging by the number of comments defending their decision to patent/whateverthehellthey like their software.
"I believe it, therefore the world does" isn't a valid argument
(*said in a degree of lightheartedness, not wanting to provoke a flamewar*)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
i got it at around 1am this morning, after it was just released. i thought i reported it here pretty early, too. whatever. anyhow, it's working and it's REALLY SCARY. check out my screenshots here. hell, i'll even put the original archives i downloaded off of vmware.com (before it went down and all) up there, too. i think you might need a license key, though, too -- that was available free at their site before it went down. oh well.
it runs pretty nicely, too. i've got a p2/350 and most things run pretty fast, but in full-screen mode (which is WAAY freakier than the screenshots) it a] scares me because i can't even tell i'm in linux, and b] seems to run eerily well. in the config program, there's a "memory slider" that allows you to specify how much memory you want the virtual machine to think it has (and thus still from your host OS's cpu/mem). i haven't spent the time to install anything big, so i haven't played quake or whatever on it yet.
i also still haven't moved up to the X server they want me to use, or even to the latest X version (i know, i'm lazy) -- vmware tells me that if i get it it'll use DGA better for better full-screen mode. i was too busy playing "solitaire."
regarding the license key: i put it up on my blooming vmware site for now
hope this all helps.
actually, funny thing you mentioned that. that's due in a month or so, according to their website, the intentioned audience being "IT executives looking into new solutions with Linux" and lots of scary stuff.
i'm running 2.2.3 and i didn't have those problems ... i guess that's all i can tell you. i assume you have module support enabled in your kernel, and you did "make modules; make modules_install" when you built your kernel...
wow, thanks. i tried that and it gave me "can't initialize ide0:0" but i realized that's because i wasn't running vmware as root! i'm using my own primary partition right now and everything seems to work ... thanks.
nope, sorry, i was wrong, you CAN boot from /dev/hda. you just specify "/dev/hda" as your hard drive in the config program and remember to run it as root.
i would be afraid of running linux in linux though. that might mess some things up.
nope, sorry, i was wrong, you CAN boot from /dev/hda. you just specify "/dev/hda" as your hard drive in the config program and remember to run it as root.
i would be afraid of running your current linux partition with that same partition as your host OS, though. that might mess some things up.
i've got it here.
oh, and my vmware screenshots are still being served at here. anyone else got vmware working well? i'm curious to know, i'll put shots up on my ever-growing site.
also, has anyone used the X server that came with vmware? i haven't, but it still seems kind of fast anyhow. does it significantly improve things?
anyone try playing quake or something like that?
i've still got all those crazy vmware screenshots here. today i served up 5.9 gigs because of a single link from slashdot this morning -- scary. i guess i'll probably have hit 6 when i wake up.
okay, i just got *everything* working. i'm using both /dev/hda AND a virtual HD and it's just as fast as if i were running win95 w/out vmware. i've run quake, aol, ms IE, cuteftp, pagemaker 6.5, photoshop 5.0, and a host of other programs and they all work wonderfully. check out my screenshots.
According to the FAQ, Game support in v1.0 is going to be marginal. In particular, DirectX and Joysticks are not supported.
All you have to do is add the disk on which your linux root partition is located. Then using the script make-saferawdisk.pl add readonly acces to your root partition and add the generated file as your second hard drive.
Just a quick post because I want people to be careful with using raw disks with VMware. We would really prefer people *not* to run as root to access raw disks. There is a tool (vmware-distrib/make-saferawdisk.pl) included with the product that helps set up raw disk access and provides a level of protection to avoid accidents. Full instructions for using raw disks with VMware are at http://www.vmware.com/support/rawdevices.html. We will make this easier to use in future releases.
Sorry I can't respond directly to emails. Please email general technical questions to tech_info@vmware.com. For technical support problems see our on-line support section at http://www.vmware.com/support/support.html. You can report technical problems on-line using
forms there. Enjoy.
Darryl Ramm VMware, Inc. Palo Alto , CA.
VMWare *almost* boots my windows partition...it /dev/hda, which has only windows installed), I get:
...
passes the bios screen and all that, but when LILO
tries to load (i use lilo on the MBR of
L 01 01 01 01
ad nauseum. I can't quite remember what that number means....does anyone know how to fix this, or at least get around it so i can boot from my DOS partition?
huh...that did it...just adding a device for ide0.1 that pointed to /dev/hdc did the trick! win98 loads and everything.
Bochs is similar in concept to this...an x86 emulator. One cool thing about Bochs is that it doesn't use any assembly code, so you can compile it on pretty much anything (I think i'll try it out on the UltraSparcs on campus some time). But that also means it's kind of slow (okay, a lot slow). Buuuut, "they" are working on dynamic translation, and premliminary tests show an increase in speed of several orders of magnitude (and that's just optimizing three instructions!). One other cool thing that i've noticed with bochs is that you can use your own VGA and BIOS ROM images...woowoo.
Interesting... I have SCSI emulation installed, and everything works OK for me, installing NT 4.0 workstation over Linux 2.0.36...
See, the weird thing is that I didn't do anything special at all, it just worked fine. But, here is my nt4.cfg for anyone who cares...
/home/dmiller/vmware/nt4/nt4.dsk
/dev/cdrom
/home/dmiller/vmware/nt4/nt4.nvram
/home/dmiller/vmware/nt4/nt4.log
--------------------------------------------
#!/usr/local/bin/vmware
# virtual hard disk on primary master
ide0:0.present = TRUE
ide0:0.fileName =
ide0:0.mode = persistent
# CD-ROM
ide1:0.present = TRUE
ide1:0.deviceType = atapi-cdrom
ide1:0.fileName =
# no floppy installed
floppy0.present = FALSE
# networking bridged to real ethernet
ethernet0.present = TRUE
ethernet0.connectionType = bridged
# memory size
memsize = 64
# nvram
nvram =
# log file
log.fileName =
# hints
hint.guestOS = nt4
sound.present = TRUE
The expiration is 1 month after you download it. I just got mine and it expires 4-16-99
Can i use scsi hdd to boot from it OS?
According to VMware's download info, it's slow due to "asserts" being turned on (debugging feature).
They say this can slow things down by some percents, or upto a factor of 2, depending on what is going on. This will be turned off in the Final Commercial Release
Anyone gotten networking to work with VMWare yet? I know it's supposed to do that whole bridging thing, and assign itself a fake Ethernet address, but I'm a little vague on that whole process. When I tried to run Eudora and Netscape on my win partition, it definitely did something, because it took out my ethernet jack for an hour (i.e. ethernet thought I was using a card with an unauthorized ethernet address). How can I make it properly "bridge" through Linux? And has anyone been able to d/l the modified X Server? The link was broken earlier when I tried it. I can only get standard VGA graphics, and I think maybe this modified X Server would fix that in some way, although I'm not sure. Lemme know if you have solutions to these problems. BTW, VMWare runs slow as ass for me, off of /dev/hda. I gather it will run much faster if I give in and make a virtual partition thingie and install Win98 clean. Maybe I'll try that when I get my Win98 CD back from my friend (he's just using it for "evaluation" purposes).
Cool... I guess I should rephrase my problem. Our ethernet is configured so that only one ethernet address may be connected per user, which usually means one ethernet address per ethernet jack. Since I have this configured to use my 3com NIC EA, the ethernet bugs when an unauthorized ethernet address (i.e. Win98 networking under VMWare) tries to connect to anything, and it responds by auto-shutting down my ethernet jack for an hour, which is a mild pain in the ass. I guess I was trying to figure out some way to get networking to work without making another ethernet address. Probably not though. Damned fascist computer services people.
If I understand the description of VMWare correctly, it is a virtual
machine running on Linux, on which you can run another protected mode
operating system. They claim that this is done in an efficient manner.
I don't see how you could do this without having the virtual machine be
a part of the kernel. In order to execute priveleged instructions (such
as those for initiating disk I/O), you either have to run them on the
processor directly (and thus need to be running in kernel mode) or the
virtual machine needs to trap the instructions and use some sort of
system call to execute them on behalf of the OS that is running on the
virtual machine (i.e. "emulate" them). It would be incredibly slow to
run an entire operating system in this manner since all priveleged
instructions would cause a trap to the the kernel that the virtual
machine is running on.
However, as Chris Pimlott pointed out we'll never know the answer to that.
So how do you propose that it be done as a user-mode application Otto?
VMWare looks great, but i cant connect to their webpage to try it out so before i even bother i have a few questions maybe u guys can answer now that its out..
/dev/hda1 and linux on /dev/hda3 i can run my win95 partition right?? or do i have to install windows on my linux partition??
1. Does it SHARE a PPP link with all the OSes concurrently?
2. If i have win95 on
thanx,
AJ
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