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Linux Software

Plex86 Boots Linux In Normal Mode 118

Posted by Hemos from the hacking-stuff-around dept.
Kevin Lawton writes: "Plex86 just reached the 'Linux squared' state. I just got plex86 running on a Linux Mandrake 7.1 host, to boot an old RedHat 5.0 disk image file (installed with bochs some time ago). CVS updates coming in the next few days. Next on the chopping block are the MS Windows OSen! "
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Plex86 Boots Linux In Normal Mode More

Plex86 Boots Linux In Normal Mode

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  • Cool. So now I can run Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside...
    Fun, fun, fun :-)
  • Imagine a Beowulf array inside there...
  • ...to VMware now? Is it a viable alternative?

  • Plex86 Background Info (Score:3)

    by NoInfo ( 247461 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @01:29PM (#675534) Homepage Journal
    A little context doesn't hurt. http://www.plex86.org/info.phtml [plex86.org] .
  • Someone can tell me the difference. Both like to be Mandrakesoft thing and boot look written by the same people and bochs look to have more feature than plex86. I'am wrong. Btw. Excuse my english. I don't have english lexique :-)
  • How about a few thousand images on a single IBM s/390 running Linux kernels, running linux kernels, running linux kernels ...running VMWare, running WinNT, to show off the BSOD feature;)

    simon
  • About half past three, sir.

  • Re:Plex86 and bochs (Score:3)

    by CodePoet82 ( 177189 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @01:40PM (#675538) Homepage
    If i am not mistaken, they are both written by the same people.. the diffrence between them is in their speed... Bochs emmulates an x86 chip on any hardware it will run on (say, on a Mac running PPCLinux or whatever). Plex86 uses the actual CPU in a virtualized invironment.... it requires real x86 hardware under it, but is much faster than emmulating everything as is done by bochs.
  • The "boxen" inside joke was funny, the first time I heard it, when I thought it was a one-shot joke. Using it consistently is just plain stupid, but anyone who takes the initiative to stretch the bad joke into other uses is a major-league asshole.

    English is screwed up enough as it is, and it's the language the world is being forced to learn. This kind of shit is confusing to students of English, and offensive to native speakers.

    --------

  • Re:So how does it compare... (Score:5)

    by tomita ( 36970 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @01:41PM (#675540)
    Probably not.

    Does it

    Support printers?

    Support audio devices?

    Support video modes other than text?

    Provide graphical configuration?

    Support accelerated display via DGA?

    Support floppy drives?

    Support ip through the host's adaptor?

    Support serial ports

    Support fullscreen mode.

    Of course it doesn't. Vmware does all these things today. Not a year from now, or two years. Not just on linux. Buy a copy of vmware. They deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software.

    And no, I don't work for them

  • I do hope you realize that VMWare and plex86 will not run on a IBM mainframe since they do not emulate the CPU, they only emulate certain protected mode instructions, while letting the rest of the instructions run on the real processor. This is also why you can't run VMware in VMWare.

  • Start counting... (Score:5)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @01:45PM (#675542) Journal
    I still rememeber how, some years ago, OS/2 decided to overcome Windows. Unfortunately M$ did a smart move in time, by launching Win95. Most of OS/2 Windows emulation was based on 16 bit Windows. Besides, the mixed nature of Win95 (it has both 16/32 bit code) and its weird integration/embedding, made the transfer of Win32 code to OS/2 a nearly impossible task. During the years, it seems that IBM tried several times to recover from this blow. However M$ managed to smartly maneuver and avoid the danger. First by forcing IBM to accept its supermacy on market. Second by smartly destroing those who could help IBM to move OS/2 forward.

    Today the situation is pretty different. First people don't wanna move from a classic Win32 basis, that has established deep roots. Most people use, for years, Win98/NT. Some have transferred to Win00, but this OS looks more as a continuation of old NT traditions. So, improvements are more superfluous than useful. The only good thing is that it is stable for a larger field of activies than Win98/NT.

    In the mean time I have seen that M$ customers became quite conservative. The new great WinMe looks as the biggest M$ fiasco since th ill-famous DOS 4.0. Apart from this, we have to note that M$ does not promise any inovations in the short future.

    Right now the Linux front presents three great achievements:

    VMWare is working stable and fast on Linux.

    Recently Wine started to launch such important apps like Word00 & Excel00

    Now Plex86 seems set forward to start implementing Windows emulation on Linux

    If nothing changes, than soon we may face the fact that te last M$ bastion will fall. If M$ does not have in its hat a new rabbit or a new OS implementation then it will surely loose ground. First by those who don't need anymore "two OS's in one hardware". Second becaudse many average users will be able to launch M$ soft on linux.

    So time to start counting backwards...

  • Great (Score:3)

    by AntiTuX ( 202333 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @01:48PM (#675543) Homepage
    I honestly consider this a good thing. Plex86 originally started as a vmware killer, and has grown quite a userbase. It is true that it's behind vmware by at least a few years, but you have to remember, that when the original vmware beta came out, it had a lot of bugs also. I remember using it for the first time, and quite frankly, i was quite impressed. Right now, in the state that plex86 is in, I'm even more impressed than when i first saw vmware. The reason being that it hasn't taken 3 years to get a working emulator. Now comes the big question: how badly do people want to have a "FREE" emulator? I would like to see more people work on this project, and maybe at one point in time, show microsoft that they can't always have the market by the balls. Sorry for this being so long, I just had a lot to say.
  • Buy a copy of vmware. They deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software.

    They also harass you with email quite a bit after you download their demo. I equate this to the mobs of harpies which descend upon you when you enter a clothing store. I'm impressed at what they've done, but I don't feel like giving them any cash at this point.

  • There was plex86 version 1.0 on the ftp site last night... He said he'd have to update the cvs there... but I still wonder if that is the version that he's showing off there(there were boot images as well..). I'll have to try it out tonight.
    "Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll" --The Programmer's Digest [sufftech.net]

  • DVD (Score:3)

    by tobt4josh ( 234448 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @01:56PM (#675546)
    It would be wonderful if any of the programs(VMWare or plex86) would be able to make use of the DVD player that is currently functioning as my overpriced CD-ROM drive. Even though my DVD troubles have yet to be solved, I do have to praise VMWare for it's ability to use the ports. Since there is no adequate software for loading mp3's onto a creative nomad or for linking to a ti calculator, VMWare has become a good friend of mine. IF plex86 were to add these features, I might consider switching. But VMWare was $100 well spent
  • bzzt. An apostrophe would be used with the possessive, as in "the OS' dominance", but not in this case. OSes is correct. IMHO.
  • ...till your daddy takes the kernel away!!
  • But with OS being an acronym, it's safe to say "OS's" with the term "operating system's" being correct. Sorry to give you the sytactical smackdown.
  • I have to disagree with some of your analysis of OS/2 and its demise at the hands of MicroShaft. Quite frankly, the IBM hardware sales machine were staffed by folks that seemed to have less than no interest in moving OS/2 - they sold lots of boxes with Windoze on them, but OS/2 wasn't commonly available.

    Now, that OS had a big weak point in that it could be an ironclad S.O.B. to install, but once you got it up and running, it was a pretty kick ass OS. They had one of be best word processors (describe), some of the best little utilities (EPM, etc), and the OS was pretty fast. And the IBM compiler seemed to produce some pretty fast executable code and compiled quickly compared with my NT MSVC.

    I used OS/2 Warp (3/4) and found it to be a stable platform with really good process and thread scheduling - the scheduler is still (IMO) better than the one in NT (which I think sucks @ss). And the memory management for threads was pretty decent too.

    Compared to dealing with the guts of NT, it was a pleasure to code to - IBM knew how to write APIs.
    And the command line capabilities were great.(once you roamed the Usenet groups and online resources to find out about these - I'm sure the OS/2 PM programmers purposefully ommitted most documentation on the command line - "little" things like how to kill a process from the command line....)

    I miss OS/2. I like my NT4 box (though I wish USB and Direct-X support were up to snuff), but I have a feeling the same machine running OS/2 Warp would kick its ass speedwise for most things.

    And the OS/2 hackers on the net always seemed a wonderfully easy to deal with, well educated, and quite design savvy bunch. Kind of like a smaller sector of the ./ and Linux mentality.

    It's a good product that got buried by p*ss poor marketing. Now we've got maturing mediocrity - otherwise known as NT.

  • Yes, despite the fact that the article states that it doesn't run MS Windows yet, and that nearly everyone who runs VMware on Linux uses it to run MS Windows, Plex86 is by an inexplicable mystery a viable alternative to VMware.

  • Re:OK, so let's see ... (Score:4)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @02:06PM (#675552) Homepage Journal
    Actually that doesn't explain why you can't run VMware in VMware. VMware provides a virtual protected mode x86 (for x>=3), which is what is necessary to run 32-bit Windows, Linux, etc. However, they must have not quite completely implemented the virtual protected mode; if they had, VMware would work fine running under VMware, just like VM/370 under VM/370.

    What it does explain is why VMware doesn't run on the Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, etc.

    If you run Bochs on another processor, you should be able to run VMware or Plex86 on that.

  • The original VMWare beta rocked on even the way plex86 is today.

    I'm not knocking plex86.. it's a great project.

    But it was not built as a 'vmware killer'. It was simply build as a cool project.

    And it's not an emulator.
  • Unless you are running a warez copy of Windows in VMWare/Plex86/anything else you still bought a copy of Windows in other words they still get paid. I would rather see Wine succeed in getting full 100% compatability (even 75% as long as MS Office is included) than this.
    Sorry but I thought it needed to be said

  • Um, no. An apostrophe should never be used except to show possession or word contraction, neither of which are happening here. This is a simple plural, so it should be either "OSs" or "OSes". Even if this were a possessive (e.g. "One of the OS's features is that it crashes a lot."), your statement would be wrong, because you're only supposed to use a trailing apostrophe when the word ends in an "s" and the word is plural. Thus, "The elephants' tusks" works, when we're talking about a group of elephants, and "The elephant's tusks" works, when we're talking about a single elephant, but, if a single elephant had the name "Horus", we'd be talking about "Horus's tusks."

    (Sorry for the off-topic post. I rarely correct folks on their grammar, but it bothers me to see someone else do it when they do it wrongly.)

  • You do have a good point, but I'm still impressed at this Free project. It's come a long way since the first time I used it, and I believe it will go a long way in the future.
  • Actually, if you read the VMware whitepapers, neither is VMware. So what's your point in bringing that up again?
    "Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll" --The Programmer's Digest [sufftech.net]
  • I will not give a penny for a software that is slow as a snail, the minimum system requirements are ridiculously high, hope plex86 will be better.

    What's more, I receive tons of spam from Vmware, so they definitely DO NOT deserve my money. Long live Free software !

    I bought Win4Lin [netraverse.com] instead, and I'm really impressed with it, it runs at nearly the original speed! As what most people want is a way to use the few Windows applications they have to run everyday, it's just great. If a couple of guys pretend they have to run Netware, WinNt and Win98 on the same machine at snail pace, that's fine for them, but as I have no masochistic tendencies, I will keep using the fastest solution.

    And as someone said : Buy Win4Lin [netraverse.com]They deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software ! ;>

  • The x86 is not actually virtualizable (since
    there are instructions which do different things
    at user and supervisor level, and which don't
    cause an exception) so vmware has to scan the
    code to be executed for non-virtualizable
    instructions and replace them in some way.
    This work well with well behaved OSes and
    programs, but it breaks down when the
    program being run inside vmware does
    something unusual like scanning its
    own code for non-virtualizable
    instructions.
  • VMware accesses the processor directly. That's what that driver that comes with it does, allows direct processor accessies to attempt to achieve the 5% margin they were aiming for. Perhaps things changed in 2.0, but from 1.2, it was still calling the processor directly. Otherwise different devices wouldn't work(like DVD). On other platforms, it'd fall flat on it's face as far as I know.
    "Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll" --The Programmer's Digest [sufftech.net]
  • I've personally had great luck with GtkTiLink [freshmeat.net], which supports all calculators, gray and black link cables, and has a nice interface.
  • How is this flamebait?!?! Offtopic, yes, Funny, marginaly, but flamebait?? Sheeess. Sombody go up on the wrong side of moderations this morning.

    ~Sean
  • Linux is/has:

    - S.O.B. to install

    + a pretty kick ass OS

    + some of the best little utilities

    + the OS is pretty fast

    + compiler seems to produce some pretty fast executable code

    + compiles quickly compared with NT MSVC

    + a stable platform

    + really good process and thread scheduling

    + the scheduler is still better than the one in NT (which sucks @ss)

    + the memory management for threads is pretty decent too

    + Compared to dealing with the guts of NT, it is a pleasure to code to

    + the command line capabilities are great

    + the same machine running Linux will kick ass speedwise for most things

    + a (-SMALLER :( ) sector of the Linux community is wonderfully easy to deal with, well educated, and quite design savvy bunch

    + It's a good product

    - that got buried by p*ss poor marketing

  • Yes it was, and yes it is.

    I remember when Kevin first started the project, it was because he wanted a free vmware. It was even called FreemWare :)

    And it contains a version of bochs, and can be run in pure emulation mode, so it is both an emulator and a virtualiser, which IMHO will be why it will kill vmware, coz it can emulate for times when it can't virtualise.

    Gfunk

  • OS/2 went down for both reasons, M$ skillfully manuvered a new OS into place with lots of hype and marketing, and the canabilizm(sp?) inside IBM with respect to the hardware pushers. They should have been pushing OS/2 out the door with every new PC. If you wanted windows you could buy it off the shelf...

    There was a pretty rabid OS/2 following too. I remember being on some mail lists about OS/2 development, the perople were obnoxiously rabid about taking down MS, not unlike todays linux crowd... IBM blew it big time, they had a loyal following, and a good product, they just forgot how to sell it... it is a real shame.

    I think/hope they learned their lesson. They are doing good things(tm) with Linux now.

    ~Sean
  • But with OS being an acronym, it's safe to say "OS's" with the term "operating system's" being correct. Sorry to give you the sytactical smackdown.

    Please see Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots [angryflower.com] :)

    Gfunk
  • Sorry but I also have to disagree on your analysis of IBM. The IBM you talk about is the battered IBM after nearly 10 years of pushing a "Big Idea" (tm). The big idea was to deliver "everytthing in one bunch", a ultra-system that integrated everything from Ironclads to personal computers (the famous PS/2). I still remember this time because I had a relative too close to these events. IBM did push hard to implement OS/2. However, in 1995 it started to give up as Win95 was surely a winner. The "super-integration" was a fiasco. People run for the traditional PC and refused the PS/2. In the beginning OS/2 worked in IBM-only hardware. Microsoft did also some Dirty Job (copyright Bill Gates) to this process by mining most development of OS/2 (at least three times it put IBM in shambles).

    The IBM you talk about is the IBM loosing billions of dollars, bathered by internal conflicts, loosing the all-mighty monopoly in the market of computer systems and being slandered by Microsoft. To reach this it took ten years for IBM.

    Btw. This new Microsoft's .NET concept reminds too much the same "Hurrah!" mode of IBM's legions in the 80's. So you may get an idea...
  • ...like BeOS or perhaps a *BSD? If there's only text mode, then I guess we have a while to wait for BeOS in Linux.
  • Shakespeare was inconsistant in his spelling of character's names, places, and objects.

    Bob is much better.

  • "Now we can see that undoubtely Windows BEATS Linux! The benchmarks shows an average of Windows 2000 being 10000 times more faster on a Redhat 10.0/LAM-MPI/Plex86 PIV 1,5MHz 256 Mb RAM 30Gb HDD rather then Linux-only on this same machine! This result proves the reliability and superior speed of Windows 2000 compared to any other platform! Linux shows nothing that can be compared to this always new, always fresh OS from Microsoft...

    For testing benchmarks, a network of 1000 machines was used, linked through 1Gb Ethernet. On all machines we ran Windows & Linux."

  • Its OSen
  • whoops! this product is called win4lin, and runs damn well. i'm currently running win98 and outlook (as exchange client).
  • "I bought Win4Lin instead, and I'm really impressed with it, it runs at nearly the original speed!"

    "but as I have no masochistic tendencies, I will keep using the fastest solution."

    So Win4Lin was a waste of money since you are using Windows anyway.

  • "so fsck'in buzzwordy, they make my head hurt."

    Yeah, not at all like "fsck".

  • I have to agree. VMWare is one of the coolest pieces of software I run. No more quad-booting for me. And yes, I'm almost ashamed to admit, I run it under Win2000, not Linux.

    My favorite features:

    1. You can roll back changes to the virtual disk
    2. You can suspend to disk and restore very quickly

    I keep a couple VM's around with Win98 and different browser versions so I can test web sites. I have a couple disk images of clean Win98 and NT4 installs so I can test installers. And of course I have a Linux image just so I can run nessus, which I can't seem to get working under OpenBSD.

    Now if I could just get it to boot QNX.

  • "Implementing Windows emulation on Linux" isn't part of the plex86 picture. Like VMWare it allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on one machine. Or rather two machines, one real one virtual. You still need to have Windows installed, you just don't have to reboot to use it.

    I can imagine a few reasons why software like Plex86 or VMware might ultimately harm Microsoft. For example, they might help ease a Windows-to-Linux transition. But they don't let you run Windows software without Windows. Even Wine doesn't really do that (yet).

  • No, no (Score:5)

    by Green Monkey ( 152750 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @04:03PM (#675577)
    ...it's GNU/Linux! What you really meant to say is that you can run GNU's Not Unix's Not Unix's Not Unix's Not Unix's Not Unix's Not Unix's Not Unix / Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside Linux inside...

    Oh dear.

  • I tried Win4Lin on my machine. The setup was quite quirky. The scripts they include died on me on several occasions. I will not go into details, but suffice it to say I was able to work around that rather easily, but it was still annoying.

    Anyway, once I got windows installed under Win4Lin, everything worked like a charm. The speed is absolutely amazing. Windows almost seems _faster_ than if you run it on bare hardware. And it's not like my machine is a speed demon (AMD K6-300, 64MB RAM).

    What really concernes me about Win4Lin though is that it runs as root, and applies some patches to the kernel. That means that every windows application you run also runs as root... which does not make me feel comfortable. Running a proprietary application as root in general is a risky proposition, but when that application is an emulator for the notoriously buggy OS, the results can be disasterous.

    Granted, VMWare also loads some kernel modules and runs as root. That's why I feel uneasy about running either of them... Still, it's got to be better than running windows on bare hardware ;-)

    ___
  • "boots Linux in normal mode"

    As opposed to safe mode?

    Is "normal mode" anything like runlevel 3?

  • Actually, this dates back to the 80's when VAXen were all the rage (anyone else remember that far back?) But I don't remember it bein a German thing but rather as a takeoff on oxen -> VAXen.

    We used to get very irate when ppl would spell it "Vaxes", etc. I remember arguing with a coworker about whether it was a good idea to spell it VAXen on a resume.. I did it anyways.

    (and yes it's proper to put the comma outside the quotes)
  • wouldn't it be a nice feature if the moderators
    could leave a explaination of thier moderating?
  • From the story:

    1) Normal mode. This is SBE (scan-before-execute) controlled. Most code is run natively, some instructions are virtualized and thus emulated.

    -_Quinn
  • Try reading the intro to the Jargon File - it's common 'hackish'. And it also happens to be MUCH easier to say for many words ending in s.

  • no, No, NO! (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @04:20PM (#675584)
    When WILL you people get it right? It's an OS that's JUST for HACKERS which is WHY it's pronounced LIGNUX!!!

    Yes, that's for "LIGNUX Inside GNU's Not UniX" => "LIGNUX Inside GNU's Not UniX Inside Gnu's Not Unix Not UniX" => "LIGNUX Inside GNU's Not UniX Inside GNU's Not Unix Not UniX Inside GNU's Not Unix Not Unix Not UniX"...

    I leave the finished expansion to the reader. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • I don't have to have a point :-) But no, seriously. What the conversation implied was that VMware was, and plex86 wasn't - saying that "vmware killer" and whatnot. So it was a comparison, no? And one of the points against it was that it was not an emulator, which would tend to imply that the thing it is being compared to also has this feature. It is similar to when M$ said that linux didn't have a journaling filesystem :-) Neither did they,(NT maybe) but hush!
    So just avoiding confusion and FUD. I apologize for the confrontational tone, senior coward.
    "Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll" --The Programmer's Digest [sufftech.net]
  • LIGNUX...sounds too much like lignum.

    Perhaps penix? ;)
  • How is this redundant? The first thing I thought when I saw this article was, "What's Plex86?", and thankfully the first post I saw was one giving me background information.

    The moderator was obviously on crack.

  • 1987 -- OS/2 1.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
    1991 -- OS/2 2.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.
    1994 -- OS/2 3.0 ships. Doesn't sell any hardware.

    1995 -- IBM Hardware Sales Force no longer interested in pushing OS/2. How could this be?

    Lots of things contributed to the downfall of OS/2, but one really horrible choice IBM made was to push it as a desktop OS, and to intentionally underemphasize it as a server because they feared it would cut into AS/400 sales or something. (When I was working with OS/2 as a server platform in the 93-95 period, we pretty much had to run on Compaq hardware.)

    Lots of good and bad stuff happened in the OS/2 world in the 1994-5 period. However, to everyone except the OS/2 advocates, it was widely known that the OS already had one foot in the grave at that point. IBM racked up a bunch of cheap consumer sales with "Warp" and legacied it just like most people expected them to do.

    --
  • I tried VMWare, but it was so facking slow I couldn't do anything in windows. It took about 5 seconds for a button to be pressed (I counted), and a hell of a long time to boot (I go downstairs, eat lunch, come back, wait some more). My machine is a P2-300MHz with 128MB of ram, it shouldn't be THAT slow.

  • Ayuh, they harrass you plenty after you download their software. That's why there are two options:

    1. Give them some Yahoo! Mail account, where you can get a new one every month in order to get a new license, as long as you can remember bobsmithe6414165@yahoo.com for five minutes. :)
    2. Use procmail to drop messages from VMWare.

    Me, I've resorted to the second, but I give them a new address every time I renew the trial license.

    Thank you.

    I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.

  • Re:Start counting... (Score:3)

    by junkmaster ( 206020 ) on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @05:05PM (#675591)
    The new great WinMe looks as the biggest M$ fiasco since th ill-famous DOS 4.0

    You, sir, are forgetting Microsoft Bob(TM)...
  • No, it places large restrictions on potential *distributors* (mainly those who don't want to distribute to others what they've been distributed to).
    --------
    Life is a race condition: your success or failure depends on whether you get the work done on time.

  • Who would run DOS 9.0? After the version numbers get so high it just gets annoying.

    Mac OS is up to X by now, in Roman numerals even. This isn't annoying but rather quite seXy IMHO.

  • But it has added a new phrase to our lexicon. For example, when you hear some bad news at work, you can now say "Win ME!" This also works with additional words: "Win ME running" or "Win ME over" or, for those of that persuasion, "Win ME in the a** and call me $FEMININE_NAME" I think it still has a chance to catch on.
  • ahem.

    This is the class's constructor.

  • Oh no. An *outsider* might know what goes on in your little social club.
    (Aside from keggers and racism, that is...Thos e are public knowlege.)

    Like this shit ever matters, or will matter outside of school anyways.
    Ye Ghods. It's not like it's a god-damn matter of national security or even personal saftey.
    It's just a silly club.

    Yeah, I'm not 'Greek', so I don't know the 'significance' of these bullshit little clubs and their bullshit little treehouses. What I do know tho, is that you're so full of shit that it's dribbling out your ears, dickweed.

    I see fraternities and sororities as artificial friends for sluts and drunkards that have no /real/ friends. It's all synthetic and meaningless.

    And I'm sorry, but if someone threatened my LIFE because of a triviality, I would know THEN and THERE that it was NOT a group I would choose to associate myself with.

    OTOH, sorority girls do make great porn!

    Oh, and BTW, you crack-smoking moderator fucks, this is not flamebait. This is a FLAME.
    The parent is, therefore, the flamebait.
    Feel free to use troll, tho.


    Richard

    ----
  • Baed on your recommendation, I'm installing it now...


    Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers

  • Well, I'm afraid that you're supposed to use original software, either with VMWare or Win4Lin, don't you ?
    If I didn't need Windows for a few applications, of courseI wouldn't need VMWare, I'm quite happy with Linux already!
  • I agree with you with you, this is something quite annoying, as well as the fact that we need to run a patched kernel. I hope the guys who work on it will improve this in the future.
    Another disadvantage was that you can only install US versions Windows, but I've read future versions will permit other exotic versions to be installed as well.
  • lol ... nothing like intoxicated moderators you get the morning going right
  • First, killed is a figure of speech. That kind of punishment is still on the books, but I somehow doubt they'd use it. Perhaps I should have chosen a better expression, in light of historical precedent.

    Second, I would really think that, in the modern age of the "dry" Greek system, that people would realize it's about more than parties and booze. Each year, the Greeks turn away countless numbers of people who just want to get drunk and laid. Those houses that don't are the jokes of the Greek system, and the houses that truly believe in their ideals strive to rise above such debasement.

    As for your accusation of racism and alcoholism, I live in a dry house with a diverse brotherhood. Maybe you'd like to speak to our black brothers? Or the Latinos? Or the Koreans? That tosses that claim.

    The artifical friends claim simply isn't worth my time.

    Now to return to the original topic, the point isn't the fact that this is secret. It's that to gain the knowledge of the ritual, you have to pledge to keep it secret. It's your word and bond, your honor pledged to your brothers. Therefore, simply handing out someone else's secrets like this is disrespecting your own integrity as well as those who hold dear the ideals of the fraternity they join.

    Some of us still take things like integrity seriously. Keeping your word is a skill I think more people in this world could stand to gain from learning.

    And as for the "Open-Source" fraternity, many of a Greek house's ideals are public knowledge. For example, our Landmarks, By-Laws, and other such information is publicly available. Many of our ceremonies are exoteric as well.
  • You are correct, sir.

  • The One True VM (Score:4)

    by micahjd ( 54824 ) <micahjd@users.sourceforge.net> on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @07:19PM (#675603) Homepage
    I'm definitely not saying this is plex86 or bochs' fault, because VMware and most console emulators have the same problem:

    If the VM is really emulating the hardware, why have seperate support or debugging stages for different OSes? Why does it matter what software it runs; if it emulates the architecture 100% then it should run anything that would run on the architecture.

    I suppose the two reasons I could think of are undocumented interfaces, and bugs in the software that make assumptions about bugs in the hardware. The console emulator's problem is pretty much explained by lack of documentation (most info is reverse-engineered) but on a fairly standard system like x86, why all the fuss?

  • The x86 is not actually virtualizable (since there are instructions which do different things at user and supervisor level,
    I'm fully aware of the difficulty in virtualizing the x86. Actually most of the instructions in question do the same thing at any ring, but as you say, the problem is that they don't trap. I was really hoping that AMD would add a mode bit in a control register that would serve to make the non-virtualizable instructions trap on the Athlon (or Sledgehammer), but apparently they don't view that as being a sufficient advantage to justify the relatively small development cost.
    but it breaks down when the program being run inside vmware does something unusual like scanning its own code for non-virtualizable instructions.
    There's no reason for it to "break down". Scanning code doesn't involve executing any special instructions that are both non-virtualizable and that VMware can't already handle.

    If there really was some exotic x86 instruction sequence that VMware couldn't handle, it seems likely that one of the supported operating systems would have managed to use it.

  • Or use your brain and realize Plex86 is still a work-in-progress (and progressing at a rather nice speed) so it isn't meant to compare - yet. VMWare is a fine piece of software, and I use it sometimes when I really need to. But I persoannly don't use commercial software so I don't use VMWare on any of my machines and I wouldn't use Windows either. I am interested in using Linux to boot test copies of other kernels and FreeDOS etc but I don't give a freak about running crap like Windows. All the software I like runs under Linux anyway these days. :)

  • Re:The One True VM (Score:3)

    by OverCode@work ( 196386 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `edocrevo'> on Wednesday October 25, 2000 @08:05PM (#675606) Homepage
    Because different OSes employ different degrees of weirdness with the hardware. They make different assumptions. Unless your emulation is perfect, there will be some discrepancies.

    -John
  • on a p2 300? yes it should be. especially if you are running windows 98 inside VMware(or windows 2000...eek, on a p2 300? *shudders*)
  • So Plex86 boots Linux, which runs VMware, which boots Windows, but Plex86 doesn't boot Windows.

    Kind a paradoxical ... don't you think ;-?
  • Pardon me, but why do they "deserve my dollars"? Their software is quite expensive (about the same price as a low-end PC), and they got started with the Bochs software Kevin wrote and let them have for free.

    Buy VMware if you like. I bought a few copies. But I certainly feel under no moral obligation to give them my money, and neither, I think should anybody else. If you want to do a good deed, support Mandrake and the Plex86 project financially.

    In any case, the only reason why this is so hard to begin with is because of limitations of the x86 and PC architecture. If the PIII were built to be virtualizable and the PC didn't have such a ridiculously messy set of hardware interfaces, none of this would be a big deal.

  • ME is an illness of the nervous system that causes suffers to feel tired all the time and generally slow down and have no energy. These poor people until recently have been dismissed as malingerers but now medical experts have begun to treat them properly.
    WinME is the port to the x86 architecture. It causes the computer to gradually slow down and lose speed. Until recently people that suffered from this were called Linux zealots and Unix geeks, but now computer experts have begun to treat them properly.
  • So the only way to beat Microsoft is by giving stuff away for free then?

    VMWare must be released under the GPL or it can't be the standard bearer?
  • You, sir, are forgetting Microsoft Bob(TM)...

    Microsoft® Bob® wasn't really a fiasco. It was more like a really sick joke.
    ---

  • Well duh. 25th generation Win98SE and NT2000 CDRs are all the rage. Of course I have not avoided the Microsoft Tax. But I've only been hit twice, since I got into computers rather late. 3 times if you count 600 bucks for M$ office...
  • Ha Ha Ha. That's the way we intend it. We just love making fun of foreigners not quite getting it right. We do pitty them somewhat in that we don't conjugate like say, german.
  • What really concernes me about Win4Lin though is that it runs as root...

    That must be quite normal :-): obviously you couldn't expect Windows to run on any machine without the capability of crashing it, could you?

  • Where's the "Duh" mod option?

    Your sentence, if it was correct, would read:

    It
    's OSen.
    This whole thing is just as dumb as the "gotta have new electronic laws" stuff. It's my opinion that current law, if applied in a rational, reasoned manner, is adequate to the task. New laws aren't neccessary.

    New ways of forming plurals in English for words ending in "x" or "s" are not needed either.

    What is needed is a better grasp of English grammar by those attempting to use the language. Perhaps I was fortunate, but when I was in school I had teachers who cared about our ability to write properly. In fact, my senior year of high school, thanks to Ms. McCord, that's all we did: write.

    Of course, I get the feeling that most teachers were not even in the same league as her.

    Jeff

  • A few years ago you could construct an identical arguement, that everyone should run Windows and not waste their time with this little toy OS Linux - you could write a little of key features that Linux lacked five years ago (and you can still construct a fair list of unsupported hardware).

    Personally, I have a lot less interest in helping out on the plex86 project than in learning and start contributing to the linux kernel sources (at the end of the day, a monopoly over an application has a lot less drastic consequences than one company holding a monopoly over the OS markets - eg. I don't mind if Quake IV remains closed source).

    But why criticize the guys writing plex86?
    Don't put other people off playing with plex86 - the fact that plex86 is behind vmware just means that they need all the more help if they are going to be succesful - even if that is just people running plex & reporting bugs.
    I say good luck, to the guys out there writing plex86. I hope you succeed. The more good software in the world the better.

    • They deserve your dollars, and you deserve their fabulous piece of software.
    Now are you sure you haven't been doing any PR work for M$? ;-)
  • M$ killed OS2 not with Win 95 but with Windows 3.0. 32 bit-edness had nothing to do with it. OS2 did a halfway decent job of emulating Win3 but its UI was different and emulation was imperfect enough to make Win3 a better choice for running Win3 apps (duh). And of course M$ provided its most popular apps only on Win3, not in native OS2 versions. Word and Excel helped drive the Win3 jugernaut.
  • Where I used to work we had a OS/2 Warp 4 switch server. We used it to communicate between our AS/400 and Solaris 2.6 on the phone switch. I took OS/2 home and installed it on an old hard drive (long since gone now). I really liked it. I would buy a copy today but I haven't found it for less than $250.00. I haven't been looking for a server but just a desktop OS. This seems a little ridiculous to me considering low end machines that would run this like a champ are just a few dollars more.

  • The next time some microsoft junkie tell you open source doesn't produce anything, point them to plex86. I'll be honest, when i first heard about this project i figured it would just fade away, but i must admit i am totaly in awe. Awsome job guys, i can't waitfor the changes to be commited so i can build this!!!!!
  • I believe another aspect of the problem is that the Intel x86 is not quite virtualizable, so you need to patch code that uses non-virtualizable intstructions at runtime. These are generally operations that would be used in kernel mode only (or are only non-virtualizable in this case) so I could see there being different requirements for "sufficient" virtualization of different OSes.
  • I used OS/2 Warp (3/4) and found it to be a stable platform with really good process and thread scheduling - the scheduler is still (IMO) better than the one in NT (which I think sucks @ss). And the memory management for threads was pretty decent too.

    I admin'd some OS//2 servers, and they were fast, efficient and stable.

    I understand OS/2 contains lots of MS IP, but it would be cool if IBM would open source the non MS portions of the OS. Even if this were far from a complete operable OS, it would allow others such as the Linux and BSD kernel people to study and learn from it, or possibly reuse some parts.

    OS/2 is not doing anything for IBM now, and this would support IBM's obvious goal of not being totally beholden to Microsoft.
  • Read your Strunk and White, boy! Singular possessives ALWAYS end in 's, even if they end in s, unless they are ancient names. If they are ancient names, it is preferable to avoid the apostrophe altogether, and instead write "Foo of Bas".

    Class's constructor.
  • .. it should not be to long before plex86 boots windows either. Apparently much of the bochs code is going into plex86. What they are trying to do is to go from emulation or I guess virtualization. I have bochs running win 95 not to long ago, and if it runs linux I can see it running windows probably in a few months.

    Maybe by the middle of next year or earlier they will have an actual 'released' beta version out.

    Gee and I was just given a window box a few days ago. Oh well maybe I'll have to turn it into a solaris or freebsd box or another linux box. Or donate it ;-)

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • I think you can basically apply the diagonalisation argument to show that it is impossible for code that is able to scan itself to be translated correctly 100% of the time.

    Tho I'm not completely sure.
  • I have to disagree with some of your analysis of OS/2 and its demise at the hands of MicroShaft. Quite frankly, the IBM hardware sales machine were staffed by folks that seemed to have less than no interest in moving OS/2 - they sold lots of boxes with Windoze on them, but OS/2 wasn't commonly available.

    This shows that you haven't read the findings of fact [usdoj.gov] in the microsoft trial. Microsoft forced IBM not to ship OS/2 by cranking Windows licencing charges up to 5 times what everybody else was paying.
    --

  • Pardon me, but why do they "deserve my dollars"? Their software is quite expensive (about the same price as a low-end PC), and they got started with the Bochs software Kevin wrote and let them have for free.

    Wow! Is that true? This changes my perception of them entirely.
    --

  • Yes, despite the fact that the article states that it doesn't run MS Windows yet, and that nearly everyone who runs VMware on Linux uses it to run MS Windows

    There's an important category of users that doesn't use it to run Windows: kernel hackers. VMWare lets you run the kernel under normal gdb.
    --

  • That argument might apply if it is scanning "itself". Because it's scanning another instance of VMware, which can be effectively halted whenever it is scanned, it doesn't apply. If VMware provided a true virtual machine, any program that runs on the real machine, including VMware, would run on it.

    A client program that scans and modifies other programs within the virtual machine is no different than any other piece of self-modifying code, and VMware obviously supports that.

    The conclusion is that VMware does not provide a full virtual machine. It's not clear exactly what they left out and why. Another evidence of this is that they require you to tell it what client OS you're running. Although they do offer a choice for "other". It would be very interesting to know what they do differently based on the client OS choice, but I imagine that they consider that information proprietary.

  • I've been running the beta of Win4Lin at home using my Mandrake 7.0 setup. I have a retail edition of Win98SE that is running beautifully at home.

    Now, Restart -ing is fun!

    Moreover, my company will begin to use this for our web app development--we are Linux freaks with Windows customers and target our intranet products to IE5.5. Using Win4Lin makes it easy to live in Linux and check out results in IE5.5 for Windows.

    Thanks for the recommendation!

    Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers

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