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FreeMWare: Like VMWare but Open Source
CentrX writes "I was surprised that no one has contributed a story about FreeMWare since they started. FreeMWare is "an extensible open source PC virtualization software program which will allow PC and workstation users to run multiple operating systems concurently on the same machine." Like VMWare, only free and open-source. They now have a CVS repository and the latest source can be downloaded. I think this project is needed and needs some support from the community. You can also join the mailing list." FreeMWare was mentioned briefly here in April. Looks like it's come a long way since then.
RC3 runs just fine on VMWare 1.1
A) No-one will use it
B) Depends on the support contract. If it's per incident then maybe, but most I know of are of the yearly contract form. Then the less bugs in your product, the less support staff you need, the more money you make... Ipso facto.
Not to complain or anything, but how does that post qualify as "Redundant"? I just looked through every other post in the forum and failed to find *anything* which made the same point that I did (admittedly, rather..um..concisely). Yes, there wasn't an incredible amount of rhetoric or analysis, but there isn't a "Shallow" button in the moderator widgets.
;-) ): 90% of the people who are screaming bloody murder because Freemware is "ripping off" the VMWare folks are apparently running Linux. Linux is a free clone of the Unix[tm] operating system which at the time was being sold by various commercial companies. Linux has no particularly innovative features; in fact, it's still catching up with Solaris in many areas and its feature list is essentially borrowed from other operating systems. Its distinguishing characteristic is that (drum roll) it's free! In fact, it was originally written because Linus Torvalds wanted to use Unix on his PC but didn't want to pay for the commercial Unix systems. Does this sound familiar yet?
To repeat myself (now I guess I am Redundant
In other words: the same people who are up in arms about Freemware ought logically to be up in arms about the very operating system they are running it on! Anything less is inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst.
Hope this makes my point clearer,
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
It's a competitor in the sense that someone with an X86 system is unlikely to need or want both VMWare and Bochs.
So he's giving his time to a cool project. It's his motives I question. He went to VMWare's news server and tried to recruit people for his VMWare clone right there. That's rather obnoxious.
His major criticism of VMWare was that it was not open source, yet Bochs is not open source. If he can blast them for not being open source, I don't see any reason I shouldn't blast him. If I wanted to make the correspondence perfect, I suppose I'd have to go blast him on a Bochs mailing list.
Performance ceases to be an issue above 192M RAM
:)
My current machine is a PII-450 with 192M RAM, of which I ususlly keep 112 for the host and give 80M to the guest. They both seem happy with this setting (96/96 was a bit unfair to the host), and the speed is good. The only time when it _really_ slows to a crawl is when I access the external parallel zip drive directly, via the virtual port, bypassing Linux. It can take 30 minutes to copy 95M of files, and the host OS becomes unusable all along. Easy to figure I don't do this too often
Cool?
How about those poor bastards at VMWare? They will surely loose a lot from this.
Open Source has its dark side too - since it rips programmers from their jobs. If this Open VMware becomes successful, there is a chance that VMWare will not pull in big enough revenue to support all of its programmers!
And we all know that VMWare is not our enemy, after all it DOES innovate and does produce some amazing software for Linux. Why would we want to hurt a company like that??
Not Cool.
If they included some pluggable module architechture, here a three examples that come to mind:
Of course, you would be able to stack the trace module and the passthru module together for a bitchin' development environment!
-AP
Well... Win98 is a monster in its own right--I'm surprised that you can get it to run at all in 32MB :(. The reason VMWare wants fixed blocks of RAM is that tricking an OS into thinking it has complete control over memory that is actually managed by another OS is a complicated process, and while they probably could do it in a more dynamic fashion (only allocate physical storage for memory the guest OS actually uses), that would probably significantly increase the complexity of the code, which of course usually means increased bugginess and performance penalties.
DOSemu has a much easier job than VMWare because hardware support for x86 "real" mode virtualization is built directly into all modern Intel class processors. DOS programs also rarely use more than ~1MB of memory in any case.
WINE, of course, "Is Not an Emulator" ;). It's basically just a library that relays Win(16|32) API calls to their corresponding xlib calls. The windows apps themselves are executed directly with the help of the loader program, so it's actually a bit surprising that it uses even that much memory.
That's all i would really care about at the moment. If the open source version is as good the the real deal, then I'd recommend that any shop that could use a spare machine(s), that wanted to allow their developers to build and test client/server applications on virtual machines connected by a virtual network on a notebook computer (or regular desktop), or had more than 1 type of desktop to support (everybody?)!
You get the idea, VM's (whoever cooks 'em), facilitate support and experimentation. This is good for people and companies looking for alternatives on the computing landscape. Looking to begin using open source software on their machines! Looking to preserve their investments and use the best software for their needs.
Credit to both teams. This is terrific stuff.
So how can free software be commercial ? And don't tell me about Caldera/SuSE who rely on proprietary software, or Redhat, who aren't making money.Is there any evidence that free software is a money maker ? It seems to me that a lot of people care more about the beer than the speech.
YES YES YES YES!!!
Blender And Linux Fan
I don't see the need for "more specifically". I made and meant it in full generality.
Just what the hell are you talking about?
I am talking about the fact that a lot of people come to linux for the beer and not the speech.
A little history, to be fair. The idea of a "virtual machine" and the name VM came from IBM a looong time ago, 70s I believe, at least well before 1980.
IBM sold VM that could load and run other of its operating systems on 370-based mainframes, like MVS or even other copies and versions of VM. This was very helpful for system administrators. Back then, you just couldn't go buy a test box for trying out newer versions or for testing risky patches, etc. So you just ran another guest OS under VM!
So, if anyone has a beef about using the VM acronym in a product name describing this feature, it should be IBM.
Wow
I've been thinking about buying a license for VMWare (but since I don't have a lot of money, I've delayed it over and over) and now there suddenly is an open source project. That's just the best I could dream of. I'm looking forward to the first final release.
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
May be you read more into my message than is there, or may be I didn't make myself clear, which is more likely. I know that you can run VMware on a SCSI only system. But, I also know that you can't run it on raw partitions. You have to create a file on your Linux partition that acts like the Windows hard drive. Yes, I would like all the raw power of U2W to be available to guest OSes. Making a dual boot system defeats the purpose of having VMware, so that point is moot.
As I currently understand it, I can't use a partition on my SCSI drive as a raw partition under Windows.
Yes!
I like this way of putting it.
It hilights that it takes time to develop programs. This is a lot like the idea of licensing things with clauses making the software public domain after a certain period of time.
I wish legislation would be passed limiting ALL software liscences as to time. After it's not making money for the creators anymore, the public should have it.
~Chris
I've been on the mailing list for freeMWare since it started, and although I'm quiet, I pay attention. It really is coming along, and is (unlike other group projects I've followed) actually being led somewhere by the remarkable mr Kevin Lawton (sp?). I have to say, congrats to all the contributors, as this is a big step in the right direction.
-Josh G
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
When was the last time a proposed open source project was cancelled because the commercial version's vendor was too small?
It seems that some people feel *any* amount of money is excessive.
The ambitions are: wake up, breathe, keep breathing.
No, but I for one would have confidence that if there was a trojan in there, somebody would notice it and point it out, and it would probably show up here on /., for all the world to see.
In particular, commercial software is invariably greated with hostility, and the birth of a project whose sole aim is to do a "cheap imitation" of the innovative commercial product, which inevitably will have the same kind of effect as IE had on Netscape. Linux hardware shops are often turned down by linux users in favour of windows-only shops. Linux users don't seem to vote with their wallets.
However, I am still hoping that, like you and I, there will be others who will pay their fair share. I am saddened that there is a faction of linux users that remind me of the warez scene.
Hopefully, this idea can be extended far further than it is today. Imagine the ability to use a single generic machine (x86 or otherwise) that can emulate a variety of systems, including NT, Linux, BeOS, Sony Playstation, and your intelligent toaster. It's certainly possible, but it's a lot of work. Perhaps this is the first step. It's interesting to see where this may go. I'm interested in seeing what kind of performance they get. I'm also interested in how they manage to split the code between running natively and running emulated.
I for one am glad this is in development. I used VMWare back in it's beta days and was quite impressed with the idea. I wasn't that impressed when I started getting spammed about the release version and 'send us x ammount of dollars so you can still use this.'
If I was going to pay them the ammount they wanted, I would expect that all of my hardware would work with VMWare, but it wouldn't recognize my windoze partition and made me re-install, wouldn't let me have the 6 IDE devices I have in my pc (4 HDD, 1 CD-ROM, 1 CD-RW)
Now with FreeMWare, it's free, I expect stuff like this, and spending hours configuring it to be useful. I wonder how this will affect VMWare's pricing scheme?
---The proceeding comments were not paid for by the following advertisers.
$100 for personal use. $300 if you actually do any work on your computer.
I'm torn up about this because it is more simple and more cost effective for me to go out and buy a small second system and outfit it with a monitor/keyboard switchbox.
The real power is in creating multiple machines on one for experimenting with system interactions over networks. But you still pay through the nose for memory.. and there are a lot of things you still can't do.
And are games even on their "to-do" list?
There are always a few non-free pieces of software on someone's box, and one that I've notices a lot of people using in VmWare. Along with Mozilla replacing Netscape, pretty much the only non-free sw people will be using soon will be Q3A [well, beside the OS they will be virtualizing, of course]
Seriously, this is great news for everyone, and I wish the developers good luck with their efforts. I'm looking forward to a release: in fact, if I had more than 64m of memory, I'd go try out the unstable version for kicks (who needs uptime, right?)
Anyway, Bochs is not free software, in either the beer or speech sense. The "you can look at our code and send us suggested changes" reminds me more of the SCSL.
True, sometimes other peoples' code looks like it was written in some sort of, well, code.
The general case when dealing with other peoples' code is, if you don't understand something, leave it alone, which I'm pretty sure applies to most of the kernel for most people.
Umm, no. Don't leave it alone. In fact, messing with it can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to figure out what it does. Add a line that prints something when it's called. Comment out the entire body and see what the program doesn't do right without it! Put in some debugging breakpoints, trace it, throw in some ASSERTions, making guesses as to what conditions obtain while the code is running. In short, just play with it. Frequently that's the easiest and most effective was to discover what some code is good for.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Note that neither of these points apply to software. Software can be enjoyed by infinitely many people simultaneously. Software runs on MY computer in MY house. No one elses property is involved. And don't go off on that 'information is property' crap.
It's not the information, dickhead, it's the labour put into the software. Do you work for free? Who pays for your food?
What would make sense, possibly, is id says "we have this idea to make a good game. It will be great. We will make it when we recieve 10 million dollars."
And in the meantime, the programmers work at McDonald's? Or live off Social Security and soup kitchens?
Well, if you don't pay, you may not get anything. Gamers pay now, even though they could download it warezly. So they would certainly pay under such a system.
You should join the Olympics team: With logical leaps like that, the long jump world record is well within your reach. The two are not comparable.
If you cannot provide good arguments, and experimental evidence that proprietary distribution is the only software model by which developers can be adequately compensated
It's not, but it's one of many models. So you prefer some other model - but why do you feel the need to attack those that treat their work as more than a mere hobby? Does your model not stand up to competition? It starts to sound like a religion...
you are a bastard in my book if you make use of this evil system.
*sigh* There you go off on a religious tanget again.
It comes down to whether you consider manufacturing software a labour or a hobby. If you work, would you do so for free? It could be argued your labour is not a physical entity - why should you get money for it?
If some pay for that labour and others don't, it makes those that don't pay (the warez kiddies) leeches, in the sense that they receive a benefit they haven't contributed to the availability of.
The question begs asking though: if they didn't want the perception of being VMWare wannabes, why make the name of their project imply that they are?
You're pretty lucky to even have a computer. I have friends that can't afford a computer at all, much less get free stuff second-hand. You make it sound like you're living day by day, never knowing where the next meal is going to come from.
Come on. You're sitting around on the internet, wasting time on a web site! You've obviously got a house, a computer, and phone service. Do you think that everyone in the country has all that? Do you think that *maybe* you take what you have for granted?
I know what it's like to eat Spaghettios every day for lunch and dinner for a month, but, really, do you think that you and me have ever had it as bad as someone who lives on the street? I hardly think so.
What the hell does Richard Stallman's ideals do for the people who are shivering and freezing to death in their tiny apartments, because they can't afford to pay their heating bill?
Let's get a little perspective here, folks, before we start going off on the "I'm soooo poor... oh woe is me... I can't afford to buy VMWare..."
Yes, having a free counterpart is a *good* thing, and I commend the programmers if they are able to finish such a massive project, but let's view it like it is: an act of charity, not someone saving the world!
I like free stuff as much as the next person, but when I can't afford something, my first thought isn't, "My rights are being trampled upon!" Rather, it's more like, "How can I go about getting this product or functionality while staying under budget?" Sometimes you're lucky and there's a free version. Sometimes you have suck up and deal. Or do it yourself. That's life.
I'm lucky enough to be upper middle class now and not have to worry much about necessities, but I also know what a necessity actually is. VMWare is hardly a necessity. It's a very cool program that makes life easier. Beyond that... well, you'll live without it.
I appreciate your situation and understand that you depend on free software, but talking about "survival", like you *need* some computer program to live, is ridiculous.
Bingo! It's the "many eyeballs" effect.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I first noticed this project whilst my continuing evaluation of VMWare was taking place back in April. The site was pretty empty back then, but they had a great idea - produce an open sourced, free (as in FSF definition) vitual machine running under Linux. Basically one can have another "machine" running on top of whatever they have already. The system works because the "guest" operating systems are originally written for the processor upon which the virtual machine is running. The virtual machine runs as a conduite or "bridge" between the physical processor, the OS and the guest environment, passing processor instructions on to the main processor. Several problems can occur with this.
1). You can only run an operating system which was originally developed for your particular processor - in the case of the x86 family of chips, this just happens to include a wide range of OS's (Linux, FreeBSD, windows, dos, Minix, etc.) so we are quite fortunate that we can have the "facilities" provided by certain alternative operating systems. What we can't do is suddenly run MacOS on our PII. Transmeta may or may be not working on software to allow chips in the embedded market out of this situation when it comes to embedded OS's
2). You have to create an actual "mock" machine for the OS to run inside of. In the case of VMWare, they use a Phoenix BIOS inside the software to provide a basic functionality for the system. The BIOS provided is often very basic in its construction and provides only limited features.
3. You have to provide third party vendors access to your underlying hardware through device drivers. You must be able to run a device driver from your graphics, soundcard, etc. vendor on the VM without any glitches. All the obscure "trade secret" NDA oriented code must just work, including any obscure ways that it accesses the cards inside the system, any broken implementations that it takes advantage of, etc. The PCI standard for one is known to be poorly compliant in implementation with its own standards - all such wierdness must be replicated entirely.
VMWare have produced some reasonable software. True it's commercial in nature, but it does provide some degree of OS independence. Ufortunately, VMWare will not yet support some of the really cool stuff, such as DVD access for playing DVDs. It is also quite expensive (more expensive even than windows).
Freemware is going to be really cool. Unfortunately, and now getting back to the original point of my post - Freemware do not have access to some of the key elements required to build a virtual machine. They need to provide the physical layer that conceptually sits atop the uderlying kernel/hardware and provides kernel/device access. They need to provide this access through an emulated BIOS. VMWare have the Phoenix BIOS whcih they have bought in for use in VMWare - Freemware have to start from scratch. Furthermore, companies such as Microsoft (and their "supporters") are bound to be unhappy with the ease of which an OS could be monitored/reverse-engineered with such technology. As such, you can bet they make it as hard as possible for such machine emulation to be successful. Some companies aren't going to like the idea that people are running their stuff on emulated machines - their support droids won't know where to start when diagnosing some more complex problems.
Freemware have to emulate pretty much everything inside a standard PC. Does anyone actually have a "standard" PC? NO. More precisely Freemware need to emulate all of the little quirks inside modern computers - the "slightly broken" standards, the increasingly wide variety or hardware and the drivers for the emulated hardware - linked to the physical hardware via lower level kernel calls and raw device access.
All the while, they have to fight the age old battle against the large corporations who don't want people to know how their stuff actually works. I don't actually know anyone who can describe in detail exactly how the entirity of a modern PC works. Freemware have a hell of a task ahead of them.
Remember, companies like VMWare have bought in the core technology from others and wired it together using their own code. Freemware have zero co-operation (probably the opposite) from large corporations and they have to do everything from scratch.
An interesting question is "does windows 2000 run properly on VMware?" Have OS vendors tried to brake their OS's intentionally to prevent VMs from working with their stuff. Surely companies writing device drivers aren't going to like guys running their device drivers on top of VMs running on OS's like Linux where one can see "under the hood" and know what is going on with the hardware very easily. Imagine how easily one could reverse engineer one's favourite windows device drivers once device drivers are supported under VMs.
JUst my $0.02
http://www.jonmasters.org/
No, I disagree. DOSEMU _emulates_ an Operating System. It does not emulate a ix86 machine. One can only run a limited range of dos based programs under DOESMU (I'm told that you might be able to run windows 3.1 in real mode). The point is VMWare actually emulates a MACHINE, providing you with the ability to run the original OS. It's all very well emulating an OS. But OS's such as windows are even more closed source than the standards that modern PCs are supposed to comply with. Why not emulate the machine? that way any new OS will run on it (with possible minor alterations for new technology over time). You don't need to rewrite the entire emulator when win2k comes out for example. Also, all of the broken stuff in windows automagically works without any help. All of a sudden not having a DVD player or support from your favourite hw vendor could become less of a problem for some people. I don't run windows because I don't believe in the methodology and "ideals" behind the beast that is Microsoft - that's not to say others don't use windows. If only freemware were more advanced or VMWare cheaper, Linux could be pre-installed on more machines and those wanting to run their favourite windows game could run it fullscreen inside windows easily without any effort (this is a while away). BTW, emulating a CPU is just plain crazy! The CPU is executing millions and millions of instructions per second, the only times one really emulates CPUs is when designing new ones and one doesn't care how fast they run. Please don't point me to WINE. I know WINE, but it is another OS emulator and not a machine emulator. It cannot ever hope to keep up with windows. Although there are larger and larger gaps between windows releases, there are still new windows releases (at least in the short term) and it takes time for the WINE guys to get cought up (excellent work guys in WINE though - I really find what you do useful, particulalry in my studies when I hjave to ensure that my code will run under the windows IDE that the marker is using - this week it was one of the PROLOG systems for windows to test code written under the standard pl implementation that comes with Linux). In short me need freemware. We kinda needed VMware, but it commercial and we want to have a publically available "free" VM for Linux that doesn't cost more than the OS running on it.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
First, I don't see that FreeMWare is coming along that great. I'll believe that they are making progress, but I don't see any screenshots.
Second, VMware is great. It does what it claims. It isn't that expensive. It's a nice piece of software. I have it at work. I don't use it much, but when I do, I'm impressed.
--
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
Err, I highly doubt it. I don't have figured, and I don't think VMware does either (I don't think they're actually tracking this sort of information), but I rather suspect the majority of VMware users have IDE instead of SCSI. I suspect that proportionately speaking, there may be a higher percentage of SCSI users among VMware customers than in the general population, but I'm sure they're still a minority. The average VMware customer is more likely to have Ultra-ATA/66 than SCSI. The kind of "beefiness" VMware requires is lots of memory, but it doesn't require more than the cheapest mainboards available today can provide, so it's not like VMware requires "beefy" systems in the sense that they have to be high-end server-type systems. Just pop a new 128MB DIMM in any typical person's machine and they have all the "beefiness" they need for VMware.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Taling about a "bitchin' development environment": 95, 98, NT, 2000, Linux, *BSD, Be, and a few others, all running in VM's on a Linux host, plus MacOS, WinCE, TI-89 (never mind), etc. in virtualizing emulators. Auto cross-compile through virtualization and wrapper functions that get optimized away. Automatic duplication of test input data with compensation for OS-specific features to test for determinism. Use VNC to remotely control test machines on platforms you don't have VMs for. Auto-tgz or tar.bz2. Automatic snapshot every day, automated upload to web site. Debug automatically picks the host where the rest of the stuff gets in the way least and lets you debug that. Hardware I/O is logged intelligently so that only what you need to see is tracked. I'm sure other people have much better ideas, but that's mine.
Ken
I see, because my operating system is proprietary (and thank you for pointing that out, I thought it was open source until you enlightened me) Mozilla won't run on it. So I take it Mozilla runs perfectly on Linux and beats the pants off IE in terms of functionality, stability, and ease of use?
It's not "ID Software" or "Id Software" or "I.D. Software". It's:
/dev/full until it works.
"id Software"
(small `i', small `d', capital `S')
Also, "id" is not pronounced `eye dee', it's pronounced "id" (one syllable, short i sound).
I heard it on a old interview with the "id guys" themselves, so anyone who wants to argue this should look up the facts first, then keep sending their flames to
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Who's developing this thing, Microsoft?
If you don't like the *gifts* we provide to the world, free of charge and free from bogus restrictions, tough luck. It seems that you made it through childhood without a parental figure teaching you that it is extremely rude to complain about the gifts you receive. Well grow up, pink-boy, and don't look a gift horse in the mouth. It's childish and rude, and as an adult and a professional, I'd expect a more mature response from you (e.g. asking "what can I do to help?") You are not the epicenter of the universe, and last I checked, the Earth revolved around the sun (no, not the workstation!)
So be grateful that you have anything at all. I know I am, and I actually *show* my gratefulness by trying to help out instead of whining about how my every whim isn't being carried out by the universe around me.
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
Bochs IS open source. It is has a commercial license. A good portion of it is contributed and Kevin has commented may times that he would give Bochs a GPL if he got a lot of money ;-)
I've used VMWare, and it does an excellent job of emulating an x86 environment, with better compatibility than Wine, DOSEmu, or just about anything else. That's impressive.
However, for whatever reason, it needs a lot more RAM.
You have to understand that DOSemu and Wine are doing different things then VMWare, et. al.
DOSemu attempts to provide real-mode DOS emulation, with limited protected mode support. There are several things that make this very possible. One is the fact that MS-DOS really isn't much more then a glorified interrupt handler. Another is that the i386 architecture already has support for emulating x86 real mode ("virtual mode"). DOSemu has to setup the processor and service some interrupts, but nothing too outrageous. Remember, DOS programs already have to do almost everything themselves, so there is not as much left for DOSemu to do. (I don't mean to belittle the DOSemu people here; they've done a great job). Memory overhead is low, because (again) DOS doesn't do much to begin with.
Wine is similar: A project to implement the MS-Windows binary interface and runtime libraries on top of Linux/Unix/Posix/whatever. Same basic idea as DOSemu: Provide the services that an existing Microsoft product already provides. With Windows, though, there are considerably more services to implement. Given Microsoft's love of secret APIs, and the fact that MS has trouble properly implementing their own specification, the Wine team's job is pretty big. Memory overhead is higher then DOSemu, again because it does more. It is still lower then loading all of Windows would be, though, because you already have Linux providing a lot (hardware abstraction, system services, etc.).
VMWare (and FreeMWare) are doing something very different from Wine and DOSemu. They are emulating an entire i386 machine, complete with protected mode support. The i386 design has very little in the way of i386 virtualization support, so they need to do a lot in software. Furtheremore, they are not trying to run a DOS or Windows program, they are setting up an entire machine. Wine and DOSemu pass as much of the work to the underlying OS as possible. VMware does not -- you have to load an entire OS again. That is why VMware uses more memory: It has to. Because the i386 arcitecture is very well defined, however, they can do a good job of emulating it. Then your Windows program (for example) uses Windows itself to run. VMWare does not need to provide a quality implementation of Windows (if that is even possible); it uses the real thing.
I hope this sheds a little light on why these programs act the way they do.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's probably a little bit off-topic but I think that people should know about this. I'm using Vmware and it's a very useful piece of software. Similar to other users, I feel that it worths US$80. There is one "small" problem.
I need to use Chinese but I don't want to change my system due to compatibility and stability reasons. Using a guest Chinese Linux OS is the best way to go. Nevertheless, the guest OS is extremely slow without using the special X-server from Vmware. Since Chinese Linuxes need a modified version of X, the X server from Vmware doesn't work.
It is okay that the X server from Vmware not supporting international encoding. However, the source of the server is NOT open for hacking. I filed an incident suggesting that the source of the X-server should be available since it's probably based heavily on the open-source Xfree86 project and of course, I haven't heard anything from them since then.
P.S. If any people from Vmware is reading this, please correct me if I had made any false claim. It's not my intention to flame sentiment against your company. I just cannot comphrend the reasons for not releasing the source of the server.
Recreated commercial products is an excellent idea if there's currently no free alternative. The point is to maximize choice. People should have the option to pay for a commercial solution if they want to, they should not be forced into buying one because they have no alternative. And from the other side, a company throwing serious development money at a team of programmers that can't produce a superior product should go bankrupt! Software is not supposed to be welfare! We shouldn't be paying people to do useless jobs. Commercial developers should make money if and only if they produce products that provide server above and beyond what can be produced by a bunch of hackers in their spare time for free! If they can't, then why are we paying money to them? Is this just corporate welfare?
Let's get real. Free software is fine and more power to those who make it, but we have to realize at some point that people need to get paid for this stuff.
Only if they are producing something superior.
And it doesn't just line someones pockets - its lets them work on their products as a job instead of some "after school" effort.
If they aren't producing something better than 'some "after school" effort' would produce, they ought not be making money at it! If they are producing something better, they will make money at it, since people who want the better product will pay for it instead of use the inferior free alternative.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Perhaps emulate the hardware was the wrong choice of words. All [Free/V]Mware do is provide an abstraction layer between the guest OS and the physical hardware as the host OS sees it. From my understanding, the guest OS does not access the hardware directly and all hardware requests must go though the virtual machine. The timeslices that the virtual machines get is still dictated by the host OS. In my model, this abstraction layer would not exist, but only one OS would be running at any given time and would be allowed to access the hardware directly (except in the case of memory which would be mapped).
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
You have to understand that Linux has gone mainstream already. This means that free software developers are no longer the majority of its user base.
I fail to see how this is relevant to your point. The people who are, as you imply, diluting the number of programmers would never have looked at this project anyway! The only difference is that now they're ignoring it while running a free operating system, instead of ignoring it while running a proprietary one.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
"Historically, free software lags far behind in terms of feature[s]"
Nah, historically free software wins for reliability, functionality (that would be your features) and of course portability. Your vendor-specific CC may have two features that aren't in GCC, but you can bet there are 20 other features GCC has over their CC, and it targets way more architectures.
I don't have a URL to hand (someone else?) but Free Software won a shoot-out run by academics interested in the relative merits of vendor supplied and Free software many years ago (that count as historic enough?) and it wasn't on reliability and cost alone I can tell you.
More recently the case is even stronger. Apache isn't the FASTEST web server you can buy from your vendor, but it is probably the most fully-featured, extensible and standards-compliant one you'll find, and the performance is still not to be sneezed at.
Actually, I'm having a tough time to imagine what Unix vendors would do without Free Software groups of one kind or another. They certainly can't all afford to hire enough people to maintain this breadth and depth of functionality in house, especially vendors who are focused on hardware. SGI's ultra-fast SMB benchmarks came from their use of Samba, for example.
Nick.
I have a request: please stop ripping off AT&T by running that UNIX[tm] wannabe!
Thanks,
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Bochs has been doing this since before vmware. It may not be GPL, but the source _is_ out, and the license allows modification.
No, they're not using Photoshop "because its better", they're using it because "it's the industry standard", it even wins awards from PC Magazine and the like on this basis, as if it were a basis for comparison at all... This cycle is very difficult to break, some say you must have an order of magnitude better product to take the top spot from one that is so entrenched. Gimp is not (yet) an order of magnitude better for profressional design work.
The thing that users of Free Software like Gimp can't get used to in proprietary software is the total lack of power. How many thousands of people around the world were annoyed with lack of multiple levels of undo in PS4? Who knows -- the only reason it got fixed was because Adobe decided to release a new improved version, and those on platforms which didn't get the new version, didn't get the new feature.
Meanwhile on Gimp, the ONLY reason you can't work with CMYK (which is the main complaint we get from designers, they seem pretty happy with every other aspect I can think of) is because no-one will (a) pay to have CMYK added or (b) do it themselves. I wish Adobe were so accomadating -- I'm sure someone would have donated a working PNG built-in for PS 5.x by now, because their expensively developed in-house one still SUCKS after all these years.
Nick.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the concept of FreeMWare and will probably support that too, but when VMWare was first released, I did not hesitate to buy a legitimate individual licence not only for the potential for it to serve my needs, but for the future potential of it supporting them better.
In fact, despite having paid my due, if VMWare suddenly became free today, I would no more ask for a refund then become a single-booting Microsoft user >shudder< :) and I can only hope that others feel the same way. The money that VMWare gets can -- and I say "can" because there is always the potential [Microsoft] for a company [Microsoft] to just take you money and run [Microsoft] -- that that money can be devoted to a steady stream of development. Thus I would still support it even if it were "Free".
There are still a lot of hurdles to VM support of generic OSes, and even VMWare doesn't support OS/2 or BeOS, never mind MacOS X Server PC port, but the constant stream of revenue which makes them look like an IPO-potential capitalist player gives them not only the force of user pressure but the application of capitol clout to get the information they need from companies like IBM and Be Systems to support their operating systems.  [In fact, it is especially in Be Systems interest to be supported by VMWare as that would increase their sales margin into the ranks of 'on the fence' users who don't want to go through the trouble of setting up a whole new OS more or less untested.]
However, without question and for all allowable components that are not otherwise protected by third-party copyright, VMWare should be OpenSource! I'm sure I have no need to extol the virtues of OpenSource to the denizens of the /. community, so I will say simply, OpenSource increases development speed and produces quality code, so VMWare, this is your valued customer speaking -- Open Up! OpenSource!
Be Seeing You,
Jeffrey.
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
/* It will swap like crazy if you assign the VM an amount equal to your physical memory.*/
I don't believe I've used the word 'duh' since the early 1980's.
I have a K6-2/400 with 256M RAM which makes it very comfortable to run Linux with 128M for host and VM with 128M. Performance ceases to be an issue above 192M RAM -- sometimes VMWare may *APPEAR* to be slower than it is because of screen refresh rates. If you run the VM in full screen mode you can get native speed on a machine with a decent amount of RAM.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
You don't even need to burn them onto a CD, really. First thing I do when installing Windows on a computer is MKDIR C:\WIN95 and copy the contents of the WIN95 directory on the CD to the WIN95 directory on the hard drive. Then you can do without the CD entirely, just run SETUP in the WIN95 directory on your hard drive. This has two advantages. First, it installs much faster this way. Second, if you leave the WIN95 directory there, Windows will never ask you to insert your Windows CD when monkeying with your Network settings or whatever, or if it does, just Browse over to C:\WIN95. If you check the CD's Compaq gave you, I'll bet you'll find one of them has a directory containing a bunch of CAB files with names like WIN95_XX.CAB -- that's the directory you need to copy the contents of. The contents of that directory is all you need to install Windows. No official Micros~1 Windows CD is required.
Note: Depending on your version, you may need to replace all references to WIN95 in the above paragraph to WIN98. Personally, I run Win 95 OSR 2.5 (Windows 95 C) on my virtual machine. It's the last version of Windows I legally own, so that's what I use...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You missed Goom and Koom.
Is there a way to write to the VMWare image file from the host OS? I mean, could you read the files from the Zip with the host, write a VMWare virtual partion with the host, and then real the virtual HD from the guest OS?
Seems better than trying to do some strange hardware emulation with the parallel port.
Open source developers aren't in it for the money. I think most serious(long time) open source developers program on projects becuase they like doing it or to "scratch an itch". Sure appritiation is great, but most developers would be just as happy if their software was simply taken for granted. I know quite a few open source developers and never has it seemed like they were working on what they were working on simply for money or appriciation. many of them have life goals like "get rich, retire early, work full time on open source software", can't you see, these guys are idealists. right now i'm writing a program that demos how to program in a new programming environment(entity, check freshmeat). I'm not doing this for money or any other real motives and i doubt more than 50 people even use it ever. open source for me is just programming for fun and something to do. you could send me donations, cards, mails, cakes, and whatever else but objects like that aren't what drive me.
The whole point of Linux is Freedom. You don't get Freedom with proprietary software.
I will use proprietary software, when it is absoultely necessary. But I will always use a Free alternative, when available.
I'm starting a new job, and will need VMWare so I can test stuff in Windows, so I have asked my new company to purchase a copy of VMWare. But, I assure you, as soon as I can switch to FreeMWare, I will.
It's not about the money; it's about the Freedom.
I would think by now, people would understand that. Even Anonymous Cowards.
There will always be a certain ammount of 'fitness' simply because a project is open source, especially if it's GPLed or otherwise locked from becoming proprietary.
The OSS you know what's in it and know that it won't change in ways that make it less usefull.
If you're locking into NT, you never know what MS will do. They might 'break' major connectivity preventing some part of your project from working. Many businesses I know use unix for mailservers and other important machines, and NT to admin the lower-end user boxes. What if part of this was broken. You'd have to change how your department ran, or switch to a new OS.
If you were locked into Linux, this wouldn't happen. There's no incentive for Linus to change protocols to be less compatible with other OSes, and even if he wanted it, he's only the most prominent voice in the primary branch, many distros would simply 'patch' the imcompatibility and continue business as usual.
Similarly, any closed source software can be modified in ways that are detrimental to you and you can't do anything about it, especially if there are needed patches which are only in the new version. (Think NT and the killer service packs.)
I do low-end database work for a client who uses Paradox for compatibility with the Corel office suite, and at each new release we have to go through and fix a bunch of problems preventing our old programs from running on the new 'compatible' version. If this was an open project, this wouldn't happen.
(And yes, I believe you can be 'locked' into Linux, or unix at least (being as replacing unix with BSD or vice versa is fairly easy). Simply have a large number of critical apps working on it without better solutions in another OS. But I don't see it as being a bad OS to be locked into, if you must be locked into something.)
Actually, when I installed VMWare for the first time I did the traditional install WINx on a real partion, etc. (most of you know the drill) But, to my surprise, you don't actually even *need* a real FAT partition. (really cool!) Just have your favorite distrib of Linux running, (I've used SuSE, RH 6 and Mandrake 6.1) install VMWare, toss in your Win98 CD, follow the instructions and you are done. Granted it is a tad slower, but it allows me to use Photoshop and Homesite, which are my two remaining Win apps. I run a 333Mhz Pentium II, with 196MB of ram, and give VMWare 64 or 96..., but ram is the key. It works with 128MB of ram, but as they say, "the more the merrier".
One *very* negitive experience with VMWare was that it locked up, and took my computer with it, requiring a total reinstall. (under RH 6.0)
All in all, a good product, that has been worth my money.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
No way. Of course, VMWare still has some issues, a product of this nature will *always* have issues, but VMWare is VERY open and VERY prompt about dealing with problems. Their supports is superb, and the product is DIRT CHEAP, especially considering how well it works.
I was *AMAZED* at how well it worked, and I went into it very skeptical. And everyone I have shown it too (and I mean people who understand, not peopel who are like 'wow, that's amazing you can run windows under linux!), has been amazed at the performance as well.
It's great if we are working on an open-source project to do the same thing, but the tone of it should be 'he, let's do our own version! and make it open source!' not 'VMWare is not OSS, therefore, EVIL, and besides, it costs $$$, and it should be free... so let's make our own so we don't have to pay.'
Really, is it so bad that it is not oss, or that it is not free, when their is nobody else in their market? They built an excellent product, at a VERY fair price, with VERY fair licensing terms. (a larger company would have charged you a fee per-concurrent-VM)....
I hope that was sarcasm. If it wasn't...well, I'm sorry, but I can't agree.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I don't mean to be critical, I really don't, and before anyone flaims me, I'm guilty of it too. But here is what I'm hearing:
"I'd really like to use VMware, but they want money."
"VMware is great, but they keep nagging me to pay them."
Etc., etc.. I understand that VMware's not open source, and that maybe it should be. Maybe after this it will be, once they realize that they're not the only kids on the block anymore. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay for it. If it's a program that you use, and that you enjoy, you SHOULD pay for it.
When developers start realizing that they're catering to a bunch of cheap bastards (myself included), they're going to pick up shop, or begin attaching themselves to something a little more worthwhile. Yes, someone else will pick up where they left off, but we need long-timers. Those in for the long haul, who've been around and gotten the experience.
I for one tend to at least try to support the projects that I reap benefit from. Granted, I don't use VMware, and would probably switch to FreeMWare if I did, but not because it was free. More because I am free, free to decide what I think it's worth to me in the scheme of things, free to choose when or where I'm going to pay for it. In other words, I don't use free software. If I like something, I like to show my appreciation of the effort, and money usually works quite nicely.
This is not to say that the developers wouldn't be just as happy with a postcard. A lot of times, it's things like that that MAKE the project worthwhile. In short, I strongly urge those of us caught up in Open Source to appreciate the authors. If you're going to switch to FreeMWare, try and make a donation. Can't make a donation? Send a postcard, or an email, or a birthday cake, or something. Let them know that their work is appreciated, or it won't go on much longer.
Anyone know what minimum specs for this are? I don't use VMWare because my processer (p233) wouldn't run concurrent os's well... I know I *should* run a beefy machine to do something like this, but for situations like mine, where it's plenty of machine for my use, but not the newest wiz-bang 750 mhz chips, will this work well or at all? Lots of non-cutting edge systems out there, ya know. :)
David.
bash: ispell: command not found
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
I've suggested updates to the story several times and nobody ever wanted to let them through. Oh well anyway is good to finally see some more on this. I'd like to see RedHat and/or some other major dist's to fund this so it can develop faster and we can see it included with the distribution of our choice. VMWare is cool but I'd rather invest my $100 in the development of an open source version than a commercial program.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Has anyone tried this out? How far have they got? When I looked at this a while back there was a lot of discussion on how to virtualize PC hardware and lots of "hacks" beinng done. The web site is interesting but doesn't seem to really say what the latest code does. Has anyone tried it?
Sig is taking a break!
I'm not sure you can just throw the SBC in your pci or isa slot.... most sbc's have an 'isa' type adapter.. but that's so you can attach an isa (or pci) backplane, so you can add cards..... it's simply so you don't waste real-estate on expansion slots if you don't need them.
The SBC is not a standard ISA device......
Let's get real. Free software is fine and more power to those who make it, but we have to realize at some point that people need to get paid for this stuff. And it doesn't just line someones pockets - its lets them work on their products as a job instead of some "after school" effort.
When the next killer app comes out for Linux I'll pay my fair share. How about you?
Okay.
1) They shouldn't have called it 'FreeMWare'. That's not nice.. it's too close to the name VMWare. It could possibly be open to a (possibly deserved) trademark suit.
2) It's GOOD that this project exists, however.
3) It will be quite some time before it matches the performance of VMWare. I'm guessing a year at least, but I'm no expert.
4) VMWare is a good product. The presence of the (lagging behind) FreeMWare may give them incentive to continue to improve their product over the next few years, or else risk losing marketshare to FreeMWare. This is a good thing, and one of the good benefits of free software, it'll keep the commercial stuff GOOD. Peoples reason for buying VMWare will be, as it is today, that it is the best thing out there, period.
5) People have to chill. It's cool to start an OSS project about something, but it shouldn't be done to 'spite' a commercial product. Linux doesn't exist for the purpose of replacing window.s. that's just what's happening now...
So what I want to know is if anyone can tell me if FreeMWare will be able to just boot from my existing Windows partition, or if that is even possible?
Well, let me just point out that there are companies producing commercial X-servers and doing quite well at it, even thought XFree86 exists. AND not only does XFree86 exist but it comes with every distribution. If these X-server companies can compete with the out-of-box solution than VMWare can compete with FreeMWare. I mean Wine hasn't replaced Windows yet has it? The folks at VMWare just have to raise the bar alittle. Since they are making money they just need to sink a little of it back into the software. If they can't raise the bar and compete with the free stuff then they never deserved to be in business in the first place.
Ok, the mozilla argument didn't quite help your case. Mozilla _is_ a success. Fullstop.
It might be that in the future there will be no market for desktop software on any platform. It started with web browsers, then web helper apps like real audio, and has now moved to productivity suites with the StarOffice deal from Sun... So end users will pay companies like Sun and MS for support for their free (as in beer) software, just as they pay their ISP now (for services). The model will be the same with open source end-user software, except there will able to be multiple companies competing to support the same software.
Since most of the problem seems to be that
the IA32 allows user processes to read the system
registers, why not build a IA32-Clone that
can generate a trap? Imho the modification would
be absolutely minor, and maybe AMD would do it.
Then think DOSEMU. This does everything FVM ever
wants to achieve, but the complete virtualization
of the protected mode. Either implementing the
software solution or getting a virtualizable CPU,
DOSEMU could run Window NT with no problem. I don't
see the need for a new project (though competition
is of course ok).
1) Someday you may be on the other end. Don't
you want people to buy your software?
2) Validate the Linux market. If they sell
20M copies of Linux-branded Civilization,
the media will sit up and notice. More
Linux products will be created. Bigger
Wall-Street hype, more IPOs, more Linux Jobs!
2b) Validate Linux itself. If there are 200K
units of some accounting program sold, then
you can say to your boss "Look, 200K people
are using Linux. Why can't we?"
3) You get a nice box and manual for your shelf.
Whoever has the most Linux SW packages is the
coolest.
4) You might be able to call them up and complain.
Or at least they can keep a couple of people
on staff to handle e-mail problems.
5) Think of it as a contribution. Those of us
who remember when buying a Unix distribution
was a four-figure investment are pretty glad
to be able to get an InfoMagic box of CDs for
$35 or whatever. You've probably gotten
thousands of dollars worth of software for
free. How about kicking in some bucks in
compensation?
Look, I know people think that Software, per se,
is going away and we'll be left with nothing but
web-based services. But today, (and most of
us need paychecks today), software sales is a
big piece of the pie. So let's keep this revenue
source viable for a while.
-- cary
>more willing to ignore it when their kid >downloads some warez, whereas they would be very >sad if said kid shoplifted. Because they >attribute some value to physical products.
There does seem to be some fantisim on both sides.
I don't have anything against companies using proprietary license's, in particular.
To critise someone for doing this without making a major contibution to OSS would be hypocritical.
However there is clearly a big difference between physical crime and copyright violations.
Say that a kid installs an illegal $10,000 dollar graphics package on their system. Is this the same as stealing a 10 grand car? In either case the kid could never have got the product legitimately they have not directly deprived the owner of income. However with a physical product the owner has lost the ability to sell the car to someone else.
I remember reading our newspaper someone moaning the laws which made aggraved robbery a more serious crime than piracy `despite the fact that more money is lost from piracy than aggravated robbery'. I believe the keyword in aggravated robbery is `aggravated'.
Hey, Get a life people!
(I mean both the cyber-hippies and the piracy-is-thought-crime-squad)
We use GNU/SunOS.
I was close to paying for vmware, but honestly I don't use it that much. I can get nearly the same performance on a $500 pc as I can with a $2000 pc and vmware.
I gotta admit, the whole 'It's gotta be free!' thing bothers me a bit. I personally like the idea of giving your software away and paying for support. The people get free software, the companies gets people who love to code to fix their stuff and corperations have somebody to turn to when it's broken.
Free software is here and it's not going away any time soon. I like to see some people using open source the right way like digital creations. Granted, here are some who will do things a bit odd (SUN comes to mind) but overall open source works for great for me.
I don't think mozilla is a failure. Even if it is, it's one thing. Look at all the other great things the community has come up with.
As for quake. I think games will forever be something we pay for. Simply because of their nature. I for one am somebody who thinks a business should pay for the software you use. If the work of somebody else puts food on your table, you should compensate them.
Just my $.02
Of course, that's what I mean by "I don't do it very often". Just interesting how big a performance hit you get with the parallel port emulation.
If the OS's are not running concurrently, would it be necessary to emulate the hardware? For instance, would it be possible to have a very thin layer that allowed me to switch between 'running' OS's, similar to switching between virtual terminals in linux? The basic concept is that the background OS's would be suspended and only the foreground OS would actually be running on the system. If this were the case, I see no reason why anything would have to be emulated because each OS would be running natively, just not concurrently.
To do what you are suggesting would essentially be a microkernel in concept. It may be possible to use the APCI (not sure of the acronym) "Suspend to RAM" (also called "Instant On" or "OnNow") function to signal the OS that it is suspended, take a snapshot of the RAM and dump it to disk, and then switch to the other OS. The problem would likely be the "state" of the system. That is, PNP settings and IO strategies. One OS may be using PIO and the other DMA.
Although interesting, I don't think your idea would provide sufficient benefits over VMWare's strategy to justify the effort.
Actually WINE reimplements a *lot* of API calls. It's kind of scary. I'm surprised that a stripped binary is still as small as 4MB these days. (I remember when it was more like 2MB... *sigh*)
But yeah, you're right on the money there. I think it'd be harder to do for the VMWare people, (and they might have already *tried* to implement some of this) but as it stands my computer swaps on the initial "Checking memory..." stuff from the BIOS, and I don't think it ever frees any of that memory. The benefits would greatly outweigh the cost, IMO...
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What you want is called Rawdisk support. It is well documented by Vmware on their website and often discussed in their newsgroups. Take a look at the following sites for the specifics on how to set it up. I have used Rawdisks from the start since back in April when the beta's were released.
http://www.vmware.com/support/rawdevi ces.html
news://news.vmware.com
-- I can't say enough in 120 chars!
If they do sue I can tell you that it won't take more than a few nanoseconds for me to never buy another product from them again. The only case in which I think a suit would be justified was if the FreeMWare team actually disassembled the VMware code and just recompiled it after changing variable names, etc. (and don't get all technical on me. I've disassembled stuff before and know that you don't get "variable names" but you know what I mean). Even if the FreeMWare team ended up using the exact same method for virtualizing the PC I don't think that VMware should sue, as long as they came up with the specifics on their own.
Well, technically they do support SCSI drives, but they must be "virtual" drives instead of "raw" drives. Fortunately I have one IDE drive that I'm able to run Windows on for work related stuff, and hence can use it as a "raw" drive under VMware. It still seems unbelieveably slow at times though...
You can't use _raw_ scsi devices (yet), but nothing stops you from using virtual disks on mounted scsi partitions. Read the docs again.
I think they announced support for raw scsi coming soon - you may want to check their newsgroups, on news://news.vmware.com
I didn't even "realize" all the "quotes" until you wrote your "informative" reply. Thanks, I'll make sure I "watch" that in the "future."
Without knowing the circumstances and amount of truth behind that statement I can't really comment further. What I can say is, I have used bochs before (for an OS design assignment) and while slow and difficult to configure, it is quite versatile and usable - Windows 3.1 runs usably under Alpha, for example. But I wonder how much of bochs is directly applicable to the problem of virtualisation?
Daniel.
Or mount it in Linux, share it with Samba, then install VMware on a virtual disk and copy what you want from the partition over. This way you don't need to trash your Windows system. You can toy with things in VMware, and no harm can come to the Windows partition.
On the other hand, IDE drives are so damned cheap nowadays, pick up one. For $200, I've got 20g of various backup/temp/nonessential space while my main system runs on a couple SCSIs. Though the biggest bitch with virtual disks, is you're limited to the 2gig file size. For me, I don't need much in VMware, so it isn't a big concern.
unlike you, my post isn't very "informative" - its just that I like to use extraneous "quotes" because I am a "cretin". To add something on topic to this post, I am the author of a moderate amount of open source software and though some of the stuff I have written has been very popular (judging by the download numbers) I pretty much never receive even an email from the downloaders. I think most open source authors write code for the same reasons I do: (1) because you find the problem interesting (2) because you need the problem solved (3) for the admiration of one's peers. Reason (3) is a huge motivator and as the originator of this thread mentioned *anything* will do (postcard, email, whatever). Think of how often you've used g++, make, etc. - ever sent those guys an email to say thanks? you should.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
Lemme look. Yep, here it is.
:)
Don't go bashing them too much, that was pretty easy to find with the "Search" function. Usually they try to put related links in that extra box at the top, next to the story. CmdrTaco's take on reposting old stories (by mistake, this one wasn't a mistake, just an issue that Roblimo thought should be discussed again, maybe too soon...) is that there are too many stories and submissions to wade through (His estimate in Thoughts From The Furnace was around 9000)
However, if a simple search function to find old articles about the (exact) same topic before posting a new one was implemented correctly, it would be very nice. It would eliminate all of the "Didn't we already see this on Slashdot" posts, as you were saying, it could add a link to the archived version going to the new article if needed, and definitely add a link to the new article back to the old one, to let people know that we are discussing this again for a reason. And it would eliminate all posts like your own, because the problem would be solved, the new feature added, and everyone would be happy. Except for the dude who had to implement it (but he'll probably be inordinately proud of it once he's done, so that's okay).
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sorry, I don't see it. It seems to me that paying for support for free software is exactly the wrong economic incentive to create software >I
The company in question profits almost completely by releasing a buggy, badly documented product.
--> Fight tyranny and repression.... read
Mozilla is a success? This is news to me as Mozilla can barely draw a window for itself under BeOS. Please tell me where I can enable the "success" option in the source code
PS: No need to go on flaming. I'm off to other activities now, and by the time I'll get back this whole thread will be history.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
While I don't have any idea whether it's technically a trademark violation, I wish the developers had chosen a name that wasn't simply a variation on VMWare. "FreeMWare" is currently a misleading name in that it suggests that it can do everything that VMWare can do -- which I understand is not presently the case. And even if it could, the name itself suggests an unnecessary hostility to the existence of a commercial product. Names are free; there's no reason not to pick something original.
Wasn't this topic discussed, oh, about a year ago and the /. community thrashed the concept about? Perhaps it's symptomatic of episoidal topics that get recycled every season or so (or a reflection of the continual growth of the /. readership) but perhaps it would be wise to include in the related links a link to the last closely relevant discussion (threshold=4) so that discussion can continue off the higher base rather than going through a process of reeducating as to the background. Also why not have a link to any forward (ie future) discussion as well? For people with limited time as any long-timer here is likely to be flatout employed on mission critical tasks (or burnt out) so short-circuiting the normal flamers and lamers and thus would get to the meat of the discussion more quickly. It would also give a better historical/future record of the crosslinked discussion thread allowing less informed souls to realise and hopefully appreciate the momentum of the topic. We get so caught up with day-to-day emergencies that often we don't appreciate that solutions have been thought out previously or smarter minds hae already considered the problem. /. is more than a newspaper or e-journal and it behooves the editors (and the pocketbooks of the onwers) to make /. a unique and distinctive experience.
LL
This reminds me of posts I've seen on Tivo-related newsgroups/websites/etc. A small group of people sit back and demand every little feature under the sun, just because they are a "commercial" company. Like every commercial company has MS's resources. :)
At least once a week someone posts on the Tivo newsgroup, "I refuse to buy one until it supports every bizwang feature of my brand X satellite box, and has firewire port for my digital video camera, and can connect to my PC and do every video-editing feature there can possibly be, and record from a minimum of five sources at once, and make me a bowl of ice cream when South Park airs, and change my car's oil exactly every 3000 miles, and allow me to open it up and do anything I want, and put bigger hard drives in it. Oh, and $500 is too much, lower the price. OR I WON'T BUY IT! ARRRGGGGGGGH." (like these people ever intend to buy it).
Tivo/VMware are good products right now, if that's what you need. $100 for VMware isn't an extreme amount of money. Hell, your average Linux sys admin can pull in that much in an hour or two of work.
That's not to take away from Freemware, or any open source project. But likewise, don't sit back and bitch/moan because it doesn't have X feature if you're not willing to put a little into it.
This sort of development is a line of demarcation between those who like Linux because, like the BSDs and Hurd, it's Free and Open, and those who just like Linux as the "alternative operating system of the day," like OS/2 and BeOS and AmigaOS were/are.
I'm a member of the former; I'm glad that there's a Free VMWare-like solution. I'm not so religious that I would never buy commercial software - I do and will - but I will always prefer a Free option, even if paying for media and documentation (money isn't a big issue for me.)
This DOES put Linux ISVs in an awkward position, but I'm afraid that's really their problem - I hope to see the day that the idea of paying for software is as archaic as the idea of paying for buggy whips. I'm not doing this to make ISVs rich.
I have a concern, in fact, about the growing success of Linux. If two people are doing something for Free because they enjoy doing it, they will usually work pretty hard and do a good job of it. If both of them are getting paid well for it, nothing changes except - perhaps - things might happen more quickly. BUT if ONE is getting paid and the other isn't, I suspect that the latter *might* say "screw this, I'm getting out of here." I'm nervous about what the move to funded development by groups like Mozilla, VALinux, and RedHat might do to the people who were developing on their own dime - and when the IPOs pay off and we get our first cash-in-hand Free Software multimillionaires, how will that affect the people who *aren't?*
Hi guys. I just wanted to put my few cents in. There's a 'mac' version for ppc machines that can run Mac Os. Well, you could run any other os you like. It's called mol (www.ibrium.se). It's open sourced, and works on just about every mac machine. Anyway, just thought I'd let you know :P
It's very simple, 31337 kiddies want all their software free, warez, open source, whatever. The idea of paying for software is a strange one to them. This is why I predict Q3 for Linux sales will be miniscule. Open source != Better, If that was true then Gimp would be the industry standard for graphics manipulation..but it's not, Photoshop is. Open source simply breeds "we want everything free" tendancies.
What I was thinking of doing is setting up a seperate computer for running Windows, and talking to it via VNC (is there anything better than VNC?). However, another idea I had was to throw a single-board-computer (sbc) card in one of my isa or pci slots. Does anyone know where to get one of these? What I'm looking for is a sbc card that's got a network port on it with a remote-boot rom (preferably bootp/tftp or somesuch), that doesn't cost a fortune ($100 range without ram/cpu). Thanks, --derek (to lazy to create an account).
I've used VMWare, and it does an excellent job of emulating an x86 environment, with better compatibility than Wine, DOSEmu, or just about anything else. That's impressive.
:).
:)
However, for whatever reason, it needs a lot more RAM. It has to physically allocate however much RAM you tell it to use for the emulated OS, in my case 32MB for Win '98, and then it uses at least another 8MB for its devices and itself, and somewhere in there my 64MB K6/300 decides that it hates life and gets really slow... That's why they recommend at least 128MB RAM. DOSEmu, by contrast, never uses as much RAM as I tell it it can use unless it absolutely has to. Usually I give it 8MB, but when I wanted to run Callus, I gave it 20MB. Worked great, except for lacking sound. Wine generally uses 4MB above and beyond the memory usage of the Windows app, in my experience. (these numbers are all pretty rough, if you've tested this more, please post some results)
Also, I didn't like it that VMWare didn't support more options for an x86 drive. I have a lot of ext2 partitions that I use for my DOS stuff, and DOSEmu and Wine deal with that just fine. I guess I could make some native FAT partitions, but those things are nasty. And compressed drives really are a hack, but I might do that again instead. So I've got a big file where VMWare keeps its 'OS'.
And, when all is said and done, what good is it? Well, I've found that I don't really have much of a use for Win '98, and I can run a lot of other stuff with DOSEmu or Wine. Just about the only thing I'd want VMWare for would be displaying videos with proprietary, unsupported codecs, since XAnim is missing a lot of them and the companies are pretty lame about it.
So why would I want FreeMWare? Well, to play around with it. To be able to compile it with my compiler optimizations and see how it runs. (even if the VMWare team does something like this... well, I don't know about it, and I can't test it)
To see if someone hacks in ext2 support or some kind of generic drive emulation that works well. (have the IDE/SCSI faking area, or use Linux's SCSI faking, and then have the actual drive, whether it's a disk file, a FAT partition, a DOSEmu drive, a VMWare drive, or an ext2 partition...)
I'd like to see it without the weird video corruption I get with VMWare (although my video card does suck
And then I'll have to test out how the native sound works in DOS, that's a must for my DOS games. And then benchmark against DOSEmu.
Of course, first I'd like to know how it's doing now. Has anyone built the source from CVS? I normally just download the releases, but the warning on this one indicated it was anything but stable.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
And some disadvantages are:
I am sure there are more advantages and disadvantages but I could not list them all.
Get a life guy. IBM, Oracle, and a host of other companies have recognized the real value that open source software development brings to the scene.
You, apparently, think that it is still for "closed source wannabes".
Enjoy your isolated little world.
Jerk
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
Dunno where this misconception came from... I have VMware running on a system that is all SCSI. Works just fine. NT "thinks" that the SCSI drive is an IDE... because that is what VMware shows it to NT as. No problem that it is really a SCSI drive. (U2W too). Works fine and works fast.
I suppose if I wanted all the raw power of U2W AND NT running on it I would make this dual boot or NT only.
YMMV
"Don't sweat the technique."
is because they are too young. From README:
How many regular users will even try to compile this program?
You have to understand that Linux has gone mainstream already. This means that free software developers are no longer the majority of its user base. Most people have a need for a working product now, as in "right this minute". Since VMWare is free, as in beer, their needs are satisfied. Of course they wouldn't mind having an open source alternative as well, but this comes only as an afterthought.
The remaining group of open source software developers don't focus as much attention of this project because many of them think: "Well, at least for now users have VMWare which doesn't cost an arm and leg. I can turn my attention to some other major products that have no working counterparts for Linux. Maybe later I'll help FMW".
The preceding statements are my speculations only.
Look at the interview with Kevin Lawton at Linux.com, a page on the freeMWare home page. In one of the questions Lawton specifically says that freeMWare has almost nothing to do with VMWare, short of the name. It's something completely different.
In fact, as for your "great commercial idea," he also explains in the interview that they have been tossing the idea of freeMWare for a long time. So, you're slandering some developers that are getting around to something that they have been thinking about already. Just because a company is ahead of them in development doesn't mean that they are "ripping" that company off.
Your attitude is the same ignorant one that a lot of people seem to have about the GNU/OSS world.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
Go get Emacs and CVS (both available for BeOS, your proprietary operating system). Start writing code for the BeOS FE.
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The problem with VMWare is that you still need Windows. (Does it have to be NT?) So perhaps they could cut a deal with MS to include a copy of windows in each RH box? I don't think so. ;-) Supporting the Wine project would be a much better move. BTW, if they did buy VMWare, you can bet that they would open source everything that they had the rights to.
If the OS's are not running concurrently, would it be necessary to emulate the hardware? For instance, would it be possible to have a very thin layer that allowed me to switch between 'running' OS's, similar to switching between virtual terminals in linux? The basic concept is that the background OS's would be suspended and only the foreground OS would actually be running on the system. If this were the case, I see no reason why anything would have to be emulated because each OS would be running natively, just not concurrently.
/. is 'Is this even feasable on the x86 architecture? Or am I just wasting my time?' I must admit that I haven't fully reasearched the latest Pentium,II,III, etc to see if it is supported, but I think it would be a nice alternative to having a virtual machine that doesn't emulate all the hardware correctly, or even recognize certain types of hardware.
The only problems that I see with that would be handling the memory. Would you want to split up the X amount of RAM between the running OS's (which would probably be the easist solution, but could add additional overhead for mapping the memory accesses, IMHO)? or would you just dump the ram to a file from the currently running OS and then load the ram image from a file for the OS you are bringing to the foreground? This would probably be most difficult but result in faster memory accesses, but very slow OS switching becuase the entire contents of memory would have to be dumped and it would need to know about IDE/SCSI and filesystems, partitions, etc on those devices.
However, this would allow you to switch between OS's without a reboot. The only advantage I see is that each OS would be running natively intead of having one OS running natively and the other 'guest' OS's would be running virtually. The disadvantage is that they would not be running concurrently.
The only question I guess I have for
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Without downloading it and taking a look myself, I'd guess that you have old kernel headers that don't include the x86 vm stuff. By chance, can you run dosemu either? I'd guess not. Did you link /usr/include/linux and /usr/include/asm to /usr/src/linux/include/linux and /usr/src/linux/include/asm by chance?
Or, the vm stuff in 2.3.x changed enough so that freemware won't compile without changes...
I think we should all donate a bunch of money to the FSF or other free software project. We users can do our parts.
There seem to be a lot of people here who are complaining that this fellow seems to be just up and mimicking what VMware has been doing well for a long time now. VMware did it first, so don't they deserve all the money they can milk from this cash cow?
Well, as i see it, they do and they don't. Yes, they spent lots of money researching this technology, and therefore, yes, they deserve compensation in the form of license fees for the work they've already done. Innovation yields rewards; this is basically why technical progress happens in a money-driven society. But three or four years down the line, do they still deserve the same rewards for innovation? In my opinion, they only deserve such rewards if they continue to really improve their product. This is healthy; companies should only receive consumer dollars if they are providing a service to the consumer. And printing more copies of the same CD is not a service!
In the past, patents drove this system. When inventions were physical and hence easily reverse-engineered, an individual or corporation would take out a patent on an invention into the creation of which they had invested time and money. This would give them a temporary monopoly on the process of making the invention, and thus they could receive (socially-justified) compensation for their investment. After a time, however, the patent would expire, and the technology would be available to anyone, in theory. Thus the inventor would receive compensation, but not a cash cow.
Software, however, has been noticeably immune to patent law (and patent law has been quite ignorant of the dynamics of the software industry, but that's another story). Ever notice how few software companies actually have patents on their software? Monopolies are not forged on patents anymore; they are forged on closed source, which has much the same effect. A potential competitor can see the actions of another company's software, but they cannot reproduce them, because the source is not free. Thus they license the software (much as a competitor in the past would license an invention).
So the natural question is, where is the time limit? How do we make sure companies (cf. Microsoft) do not make excessive amounts of money, more than is a valid reward for a small amount of innovation? Well, one way is to do what Richard Stallman did to Unix--make it free. In 1995 or so, there was a closed-source program called TIA which would allow a user to convert a dial-in Unix shell with internet access into a full-blown SLIP account. Licenses cost $20, and when I saw how well it worked, I got myself a license. But development on TIA eventually stagnated, and not a month passed before I discovered SLiRP, a (public domain) client which could do the same job, only since it had been worked on more it was faster, more robust, and had more features (PPP, etc.). So I switched. Thus the people who made TIA got rewarded for their work, but the open sourced solution won out in the end because it was better.
I propose that free software be the software industry's answer to patent law. Let some programs be closed source, but understand that someone, somewhere is probably working on an open-source clone, or an open source solution which is simpler, or whatever. VMware can make money off their idea for the next year or so, until FreeMware gets on its feet, at which point VMware will either have to drastically improve their product or develop something else, because the free software solution is out there. For the past fifteen years (largely spurred by Richard Stallman) this process has been accelerating and refining itself, what with the GNU tools, multiple free operating systems, CVS, etc. In the end , I believe free software will bring real innovation back to the software industry.
-Josh
Aren't you dead?
I don't think FreeMWare will be much better at this stage.