http://www.osnews.com/story/6742/Review_Serenity_Virtual_Station Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:23:59 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does this VM emulate a graphics card with 3D support?
Or does it just emulate a VESA card? Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? s/3D support/hardware accelerated 3D support/

BTW, this 60 second delay is long and annoying... Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It is necessary for flooding.

Regarding your question, I don't think it supports 3D. It is very hard to do so. No other similar emulator does that either, e.g. vmware or VPC. Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? While the article tells me what Serenity Virtual Station is, it does not really tell me why I should be interested. What differentiates this from VMWare or VirutalPC? Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "While the article tells me what Serenity Virtual Station is, it does not really tell me why I should be interested. What differentiates this from VMWare or VirutalPC?"

I'm hoping it turns out to be a bit cheaper. VMware is now down to $199, and VPC is $129 i think. To me, the downside to VPC is that you need a windows host.

It's impressive they are aiming for linux, NT, FreeBSD, and OS/2 as host. Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yeesh, why the hell do people use Motif when there are better Free (yes, as in LGPL) toolkits to use? Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, it couldn't be more expensive than VMWare which is way overpriced. Also, VirtualPC only runs on Windows. Thu, 15 Apr 2004 21:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The program is based on twoOStwo which uses Qt, so what you see is probably a theme that the author likes. Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Umm.. I have VirtualPC running on my ibook so I don't think it's Windows only. Or did microsoft already clobber the mac support for the newer versions? Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I hope it's better then twoostwo that product had a long way to go to compete with vmware the damm thing would never work for me under any os win32 or linux Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? IRC it is twoostwo. lol Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If there is no 3D and it is not free, then what does it have that isn't already on the market? Vmware is tested tried and true so I can't imagine that this will be substantially cheaper to be worth the trouble. Especially since all the OS freaks already own Vmware; I know I do. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 00:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? VMWare doesn't officially support a Debian host OS. I'd snatch up a couple copies of SVista no questions asked if it runs on debian, and runs win2k + msaccess (i'm doing a lot of work converting msaccess apps over to F/OSS). don't need fancy hardware support or anything like that... Fri, 16 Apr 2004 02:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "VMWare doesn't officially support a Debian host OS"

I use Debian on VMWare EVERY day!!! I have NO issues with it at all. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 04:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Same is true for Slackware. I use VMWare on Slack since the VMWare public beta back in the day (y2k IIRC); never had any Slack-related issue. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 05:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? When you dual or multi boot, you can only one run OS at a time.

Is it possible to create an OS of OSes, that would be able to run each OS at the same time on native hardware. This OS would need to compartmentalise each OS so memory areas of one OS doesn't overwrite other OSes memory areas.

Is it possible? I am guess it would take a lot of work.

and just not to be off-topic. I really didn't understand what Serenity Virtual Station is, it sounds the same as VMWARE or Virtual PC, or is it something closer to Cooperative Linux. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 08:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Various old time-sharing system did something like that...

You still need a system underneath the systems - one ring to rule them all Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What's the relation to twoOstwo ( http://www.twoostwo.org/ ) ? Does this replace toostwo, or is it just that parallax ( http://www.parallax.ru/ ) sold their system to 2 companies ( http://www.netsys.info/ )?

On a side note towOstwo is very crashy. Example: When Windows95 halts or reboots my machine rebboots too, the linux host that is Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Actually VMWARE ESX server does this exact thing. They still emulate most of the hardware but instead of having a host os you use their lightweight os. One really cool thing they do is they will compare pages in physical memory and if two diferent guest OS's having two identical memory pages they map them both two one physical page. This is really cool if you are running say four copies of windows on a machine and all of the dll's are only in physical memory once for all four guests. They also do some other cool things like virtual SMP and the ability to move guests from one box to another wthout shutting down the guest. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Cool thanks for the replies. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? As a software approach, project Xen from Cambridge tries to do that, with trivial modifications done ot operating systems. Linux is already running with almost full speed, but AFAIK Microsoft resists to port Windows for various reasons.

As a hardware one, the Vanderbuilt architecture of Intel is going to provide hardware virtualization. But this would be introduced 2006 at the earliest. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Xen project: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/papers/2003-xensosp.pdf Fri, 16 Apr 2004 18:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well if you had a machine capable of partitioning you could several OSs each running in their own partition with vnc installed on each one and using one of them to connect to the others.

So it's easy all you need is $11,640 for a P630 ( http://www-132.ibm.com/content/home/store_IBMPublicUSA/en_US/eServe... ) :-)

Note : p650 would be better if you're serious about partitions but then you're looking at $26,895 Fri, 16 Apr 2004 18:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Bochs, Plex86 (both are free but yet not suitable for ordinary use)

Bochs is _very_ ready, but also very slow, because it is _not_ a virtual machine, but a x86 emulator.
Plex86 has been revamped to rum only Linux, so it is not a competitor to VMware anymore. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 19:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "What's the relation to twoOstwo ( http://www.twoostwo.org/ ) ? Does this replace toostwo, or is it just that parallax ( http://www.parallax.ru/ ) sold their system to 2 companies ( http://www.netsys.info/ )? "

Parallax initially developed the system for one host, the German 2os2 company (cant remember the name) funded the developemnt for an OS/2 guest as to sell to companies that wanted to move from OS/2 but keep on using the software, that in turn meant that they got in contact with serenity (owners of ecomstation) and serenity funded further development of the program into a multi host/guest system, so all systems are based on the same codebase but intended for slightly different market segments/have different features.

As for pricing, this has apparently not been nailed down but they are talking about a similar priceopoint as vmware, the difference being that SvS will come with versions of all guest os's bar Windows out of the pack (FreeBSD 1 or 2 linux variants, ecomstation (an upgraded os/2 client) etc.), so it will be a turnkey system without the need for recompiling, driver hunting etc.

The interesting thing about SVS is the amount of industry support SS has managed to drum up even prior to the release, they have got a host of companies supporting the system including IBM. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 19:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If one is going to hurl rocks at VMware's windows they should be atleast courteous enough to:

1. Document the specific issues they are having -- generic comments are useless
2. Confess as to what version of VMware they are using -- using an older release that may have been improved is not fair Fri, 16 Apr 2004 21:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The following link was on Slashdot and OSnews before:

http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization/

It's an overview of emulators and virtualizers. Might answer some of the questions posed above. Fri, 16 Apr 2004 23:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? How is thsi different from Win4Lin and Vmware? Fri, 16 Apr 2004 23:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Only works on Linux with a kernel patch and is only able to run Windows 9x. I heard it is fast, but i don't have a license myself. Sat, 17 Apr 2004 13:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Does it support Sound in DOS? Virtual PC does, but it's kind of screwed up in points. VMWare's sound support for DOS doesn't work (just read the VMWare support board, people have tried in vain to get it to work). This would kick seriously if sound support worked. Sat, 17 Apr 2004 18:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Any chance that I could use this to run BeOS as a guest OS? I've got BeOS software that I'd like to run, but on modern hardware it gets more and more difficult to get BeOS to function properly. It seems like something like this might be usable as a "bridge" to make up for BeOS's lack of modern drivers (similar to how I can run Amiga programs on my PC with an emulator, despite the PC's lacking the Amiga's custom graphics processors) Sat, 17 Apr 2004 20:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? How much will it COST? Sat, 17 Apr 2004 22:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

Is a Free, Open Source, virtual machine which is very fast, and portable. Sun, 18 Apr 2004 22:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments