VMWare today announced the availability of a Beta release of VMware Workstation 3.0, the latest generation of its award-winning desktop software for technical professionals. Workstation 3.0 delivers significant performance and usability improvements over previous releases, the company says. Workstation 3.0 provides support for the latest operating systems including WindowsXP and the latest Linux distributions, supports additional peripheral devices, and provides significant enhancements in networking and better overall performance. VMware will ship Workstation 3.0 in the fourth quarter of 2001. New features include: Host and guest OS support for WindowsXP Pro and Home Edition, USB device support, DVD-ROM support, CD-R/RW support, CD-ROM ISO image support, generic SCSI device support — makes devices available directly to the guest OS, large virtual disk support, now up to 128 GB per IDE virtual disk and 256 GB per SCSI virtual disk, improved CPU, networking, disk and interactive performance, completely new Windows style user interface (Windows host version), built-in NAT for easy connection to networks, more flexible and easier to configure virtual networking, improved support for laptops and more. Our Take: No word for BeOS support as a Guest OS. Update: I downloaded the latest beta version and BeOS loads this time, without crashing. While it is loading very fast in the beginning, when it is going to graphics mode, because the VMWare virtual graphics device does not expose the VESA standard, the performance falls so much that hits the disk pretty hard. Normal BeOS boot time is 12 seconds when launched natively, under VMWare it takes up to 5 minutes on a dual Celeron 533 under Win2000 and of course it is so slow (please remember that all this slowness is just because of the unsuported gfx subsystem that makes the rest of the launching process and the OS to be unresponsive) that it is completely unusable. Screenshot here.
VMware Launches VMware Workstation 3.0 Beta
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Install DOS + DisplayDoctor (Vesa2) and then BeOS (tgz-Archive + LoadBeOS.com)
BTW: The new VMWare looks like a media player…
I just tried it (and BTW, I was the one who wrote that SDD tip about BeOS users with VESA 1.2
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The problem is that SDD does not offer a specific VESA upgrade for VMWAre (you see, VMWware itself does not expose the VESA protocol at all through its virtual graphics device). Therefore, when running SDD the uvbeconfig hangs while the “univbe -w” says that it does not support the current (VMware) gfx adapter.
In other words, this trick won’t work with VMWare, we need a real 2D Vmware driver for BeOS.
VMWare VESA has only 24 bits/pixel modes, and BeOS AppServer can’t use them.
It should be easy for VMWare to provide 8,15,16, or 32 bits/pixel VESA modes,
so BeOS would work better.
BTW, VMWare 2.x didn’t run BeOS because of the incorrect IDE controller emulation.
Thanks for the explanation Dmitriy.