[Wine] Re: Wine on non-Unix platforms

[SpawnHappyJake]

One option is to run WINE in Ubuntu for Windows. There is actually a version of Ubuntu that runs in Windows as a Windows application. http://lifehacker.com/5195999/portable-ubuntu-runs-ubuntu-inside-windows

Another option is to provide USB stick images that could be applied by Self-Image. I suppose you could let them burn bootable ISOs. (to load Linux with WINE and games)

Have you been successful in running operating systems in DOSBox (other than DOS and booter games)?

The only reason why DOSBox even has the boot option is so that it can play booter floppies. DOSBox was never intended to be able to run Win95 or Win98 and most certainly not Linux.

I tried running Win98 in DOSBox, and it was almost worse than ReactOS (no offense ReactOS team, what you are doing is good). With 8 gigs of RAM and a quad-core 64-bit Intel processor, there was no  excuse for it going as slow as it was, even with emulation. Unusably slow. Crashed at least half the time. I don't see how anyone can run games in Windows in DOSBox, let alone even Windows in DOSBox. Annoying to setup, too.

>From my experience, trying to run any operating system in DOSBox is an absolutely terrible idea. DOSBox was not made for that. It was made for running DOS games and booter floppies. It has poor "virtual machine" functionality as far as hosting an OS, emulating a BIOS, mounting disk images, etc goes. It can't emulate an optical disk and use a cd image, can only mount two hard disks and one floppy image, can only use raw hard disk images, and is overall wonky and cumbersome. I don't even know if it's really emulating a BIOS.

Why must you think that no Linux in DOSBox = WINE is not an option? There has to be other ways. Either easy ways to run local virtual machines, or virtual machines that can be accessed online. Or the above mentioned WINE in Ubuntu in Windows trick.

Don't forget about paravirtualization to lighten the load, if you find something that supports that. Instead of the host and the guest using resources to worry about and handle hardware, and the having the load of emulating a virtual hardware platform, and the load of analyzing and intercepting and augmenting the exchange of data between guest kernel and processor, the guest OS just doesn't care about hardware, there is no emulated hardware platform, and you don't have to analyze, intercept, and augment data exchange between the kernel and processor.

Obviously virtualization (running a guest OS on the real processor) is much more preferable than running a guest operating system on a processor emulator (if possible). VirtualBox is open source, self-explanatory to use and install and you can even package virtual machines as VirtualBox "applications." There is VirtualBox for Windows, Mac, and of course, Linux. You can have VirtualBox applications up for download. Once downloaded, the user simply double-clicks the application file, and VirtualBox imports it. Sure, VirtualBox has to be installed first, but that's just clicking "next" a few times.

But if you absolutely must have emulation to run an OS, use something like QEMU or Bochs that was intended to be able to run operating systems. QEMU seems to be the standard, and its code is used in many softwares. The folks at OpenFirmware use QEMU to test their firmwares. I remember GRUB2 using it for something. I thing it was either for debugging or for BIOS emulation stuff. The Xen Hypervisor's hardware platform emulation for full virtulization is based on QEMU. It'd surprise you where QEMU finds you. But it just goes to show how trusted, stable, and fast it is.

QEMU is capable of both virtualization and emulation. It can mount hard drive, optical, and floppy images. You can pick the processor you want to emulate, if any, chose the BIOS image you want it to use, it lets you pick the graphics card you want to emulate, you can enable SDL, it does networking, and you can disable ACPI or HPET. But most importantly, it is quick and stable.

They're thinking about web access to VirtualBox virtual machines:[url]http://code.google.com/p/vboxweb/[url]

I remember reading that Google was working on making some web standard that basically let you use C in making web apps. You might be able to compile VirtualBox or QEMU or DOSBox for web before too long. Maybe I was thinking of Google Go. Thought there was one that fused C and HTML. Oh well. Maybe next week we can compile Gnu-style tarballs for web. Wouldn't that be nice?

Cheers,
Jake