The free to use 'personal user end license' does actually allow you to use VirtualBox in a commercial environment, as long as you install it and use it yourself. Check out their FAQ at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ [virtualbox.org]
If you can live without USB connectivity then the GPL version is also pretty fully featured, and their 'seemless' mode is really really cool.
The latter. See here [virtualbox.org], where they say
The VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is the one that has been released under the GPL and comes with complete source code. It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers. This gives us a chance to generate revenue to fund further development of VirtualBox. [emphasis mine]
"Experimental" generally means "full of tons of bugs." 3D virtualization seems like it is just hard to do, at this point. VMWare has been working on it and at this point it isn't even "experimental" in the latest version of VMWare Workstation. Well it works... kinda. It's fairly slow and there are some rendering errors. I can get WoW to run, but it isn't all that playable.
I've been watching this sort of thing with interest since old games are one of the things I'm very fond of. However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
i am able to play sof2 fullscreen with high specs on my xp virtualmachine, running in gentoo. 3d accel works great. still iffed about starcraft not stretching to screen-size though -_____-
"Experimental" generally means "full of tons of bugs."
Not necessarily. Recently companies have been redefining what words like "experimental", "beta", and "release" mean. Just look at GMail (the obvious example).
My main point is that the software may not be as bad as we think.
However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
It makes no sense to lump OpenGL and Direct3D together as "3D" when you're talking about VirtualBix, since they are implemented in very different ways.
VirtualBox OpenGL is basically just as pass-thru to the host driver. The guest box additions includes a virtual OpenGL driver that just passes the commands thru to the the host and the real driver. There must be some performance hit, but the approach seems simple enough.
VirtualBox Direct3D is implemented using the WINE driver that converts Direct3D calls into OpenGL which then get tunneled through to the host OpenGL driver as in the OpenGL case. VirtuaBox Direct3D should therefore be similar in functionality to that in WINE. One upside to the approach is that you don't need a Windows host to have D3D guest aceleration.
The problem, as I understand it, isn't that 3D hardware is difficult to handle in a VM (it's not, really, you simply paravirtualise calls to the 3D hardware and translate them into libGL calls in the VM host software). The problem is that doing so in Windows is practically impossible, because of MS's licensing terms for the DDKs you need. Smart move on their part, of course, if Paravirtual D3D was considered a first-order citizen of windows in the same way that NVidia or ATI D3D was, then nobody would hav
Passing OpenGL calls through is easier, and has actually been done for a while now. Reimplementing DirectX is considerably harder, I think they used Wine code for a lot of that.
OpenGL already supports network transparency, you could potentially just use that existing functionality to deliver the GL calls over a local interface to the local host...
OpenGL is device-independent, so you get network transparency for free. That's not really the same thing no matter what the SGI FAQ says. OpenGL lacks a networking component, so to say it has network transparency is a bit disingenuous. X11 has network transparency, which is why OpenGL has it in practice... but it's not part of OpenGL.
I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
What you say "should be true". It says so in the virtual box manual. How I found the devices did not show up in the network neighbor hood. So I had to use the run command. I admit I was baffled by the network neighborhood on windows. it seems like their are different views of varying completeness depending on how you get the explorer window (or whatever it's called) to bring it up. So it could be that I'm just a windows spaz. but I don't think so. I think windows is simply unreliable when exploring
I might be able to help with the WMP problem, as I ran into that one a few years back with a customers MP3 player. it turned out Windows was using an MTP driver and it needs to be using IIRC MSC to sync. Anyway Here (faq#10) [sansa.com] is a patch for the problem, I don't know if it will work in a VM or not, and if it doesn't you might want to look up a little about WMP and MTP/MSC problems as there are several tutorials on how to repair that particular error. i hope this helps.
"Odd protocols, like GRE?" Hmmm.. not a network guy, are you? Should I use a standardized, widely implemented protocol like GRE, or a single-implementation solution like OpenVPN. Don't get me wrong, I love OpenVPN and thing those guys have a fantastic cross-platform solution... but GRE isn't exactly an "odd protocol".
I played around with this a bit in the beta. It's significantly slower than native and has a fair share of graphics glitches, but it was good enough to take my dual-monitor computer, plug in a second keyboard and mouse, and play two games of Warcraft III against eachother simultaneously using only one box.
As I use Linux (Ubuntu and openSUSE) on my primary home machines, I tend to run the Windows stuff - aside from Office 2007 - in VB. My kids have always complained about the game play.
Maybe not now.:P
It worked great when they were younger and Tux Paint, SuperTux, Chromium, TORCS, TuxRacer were what they wanted, but now they NEED to play the "in" gamez.
<sigh>
I'll just go back to playing my games on Stella and GFCE.
I'd laugh, except that I'm still supporting a 90's era VB6 program, which is written with Office in mind such that Excel spreadsheets are opened, closed and eventually that data are saved to a sql server......you'd think that being a PHB, I'd not have to do VB programming anymore.
I feel for you. I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to beat an Access 2000 VBA application into submission. I've got the current holes plugged, but next Monday I'm telling the guy I'm doing the work for that I'd rather recode it in Lisp than ever ever ever have to deal with VBA again. All VBA and VB ever did was allow people who had no business programming to create programs, and somehow so many of those programs ended up outlasting the original guys who made them.
With virtualbox from Sun! now with three-d acceleration!
You've got problems, we all know what it's like not being able to develop on windows - but you can't seem to give up counterstrike! Notepad carriage return issues, archaic command line functions, the works - all gone in a jiffy with Virtualbox(tm)!
Want to pwn noobs from the comfort of a linux environment!? No problem. Toss xp on there, Bam! It's done!
Want to show people your awp skills while still being able to strace!? Easy as boom-headshot with virtualbox!
Call now and for no extra cost we'll throw in the latest jre for absolutely free!
The Direct3d support is not designed for gaming, but it works for the most part. I have found a few games which do not work, Fallout 3 America's Army 3, but also many which do work, Counter Strike Source America's Army 2 Team Fortress 2 Rise of Nations.
Games are the last bastion for a seperate Windows install.
The audio stuff (Reason, FLStudio) etc work perfectly well under VirtualBox now.
You need to use ASIO4ALL to get asio working, but once done and fiddled with... hah! 10ms audio latency in a freakin' virtual machine! That is just so awesome to me!
I'm sure DOSBox runs great within Virtual Box... but will they read my old floppies?
I got DOSBox in VirtualBox, and a copy of X-Wing, but it is tricky reading the old floppies with modern hardware. With a bit of determination, I was able to insert a mini usb plug in under the sliding metal thingy on the disk, but the computer still can't work.
At first I thought it was the host OS lacking the correct drivers, but then I realised that floppies are much slower than usb drives, so they need to operate at a lower frequency. If I could just up the frequency, I could read the data!
Okay, here are the numbers. A high speed floppy would get around 500 Kbps tops and the USB transfer is around about 29.5 Mbps, so the floppy is around 1.7% the speed of the USB. So if I increase the speed of the USB connection by 59 times, I should get the USB to read the floppy correctly. Now a microwave oven works at 2.45 Ghz, so I figured that, seeing that that is ~83 times the speed of the USB, with a little bit of duct tape and some copper foil sheilding the usb cable, I could get the increase I needed in the floppy without over doing it.
So I put the floppy with the cable inserted in it and wrapped in copper foil and duct tape into the microwave, jammed the safety switch with a plastic spoon so I could run it with the door open (don't worry, I sat behind the microwave) and plugged it into the computer. Then I quickly turned the microwave on and read the data coming from the cable.
It didn't work first time, but that was because the USB wasn't acting like a drive, so the computer could "read" it. Unfortunately it was so fast that it blew up the usb port (I think, it wont read my thumb stick).
So then I opened up an old flash drive (32MB) which I have filled with 0x00 and carefully attached the chip to the disk surface with a spot of hot glue. When I plugged it in, the computer recognized it as "removable media", so I again started the microwave to spin up the disk frequency. This time there was more smoke, not just from the microwave (to be expected), but also from the usb port!!!
Can anyone help me with the right number of winds of duct tape needed to slow the floppy frequency from the 41.5Mbps I am getting to the 29.6 Mbps I need? I think the extra speed is causing overload, I am running out of USB ports and I just got a nosebleed. Also, does anyone have another copy of X-Wing? Mine is a bit worn:-(
Unfortunately, looks like they still haven't fixed bug 1040 [virtualbox.org], or even upgraded its priority from 'minor.' The gist of it is, do not even think about touching anything in the GUI relating to the 'snapshot' feature, unless you really, absolutely, positively understand what you're doing. The wording is very confusing, and can easily lead to data loss scenarios. Unfortunately, since this is a human interface flaw, and not a programming error, it seems like it's not really being taken seriously. In my mind, sadly, this is exactly the sort of macho hacker mentality that keeps OSS from mainstream acceptance.
Cool! After the umpteenth million time of not being able to build VMware Server under the latest kernel version, and this time NOT being able to find yet-another-vmware-any patch to fix it, I finally abandoned VMware (at least for personal use) and switched back to VirtualBox. Looks like I made the right decision right, just in time.
I'm still using VMware for server virtualization at work, but for running one of Uncle Bill's products on my desktop, it looks like VirtualBox is a better solution.
I will be interested in seeing how it works with USB. That's always been a bug-a-boo for me--getting USB devices to talk to the VM. This release sounds like they've cleaned up some things. I will be really interested in how it performs with some of my games that require 3D. (I'm talking like Guild Wars, not the latest releases.)
I remember VMware implementing this several months ago. It was experimental, I don't know about it's status right now.
Ummm... actually, it's been a feature in VMWare for several years... It was experimental in VMWare 5.0 [vmware.com] but it has been standard in the past three major releases: 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5. FWIW, VMWare tends to do major updates in 0.5 increments and you can go from 5.0->5.5 and 6.0->6.5 for free... It's a nice way for only paying for half your major upgrades. Minor upgrades are a smaller decimal value added on (i.e. 5.51, 5.52, etc) and those are always free.
Well, hopefully this could put people over the edge to use Linux full-time (myself included). Many people currently use Windows for gaming, and don't dual-boot because it's a hassle. If I could run in Linux 24/7, and run my games without rebooting, either in a VM or in Wine, that would be excellent.
Or simply add the WineHQ repository to your software sources in Ubuntu - http://www.winehq.org/download/deb [winehq.org]. Always up to date with the latest.
Actually, modern AMD and Intel chipsets do include an IOMMU. This does for devices what the MMU does for processes; gives each one its own virtual address space which is mapped to the physical address space.
The original motivation for this was using 32-bit devices on a 64-bit system. The first machine that I'm aware of to include an IOMMU was an early SPARC64 system. Sun wanted to ship it with a cheap 32-bit NIC, but this had problems when you have a machine with more than 4GB of RAM. If you send net
Finally? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You could also do this using VMware player, which is free.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finally? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Finally? (Score:5, Informative)
The latter. See here [virtualbox.org], where they say
The VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is the one that has been released under the GPL and comes with complete source code. It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers. This gives us a chance to generate revenue to fund further development of VirtualBox. [emphasis mine]
Parent
Re:Finally? (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it quite cool that they just say it. Why not!? Good for them!
Parent
Re:Finally? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have to wonder how they figure USB passthrough "primarily targets enterprise customers" though...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow. What are your frame rates? Do the tile bevels look any better? ;)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I wouldn't count on it (Score:4, Interesting)
"Experimental" generally means "full of tons of bugs." 3D virtualization seems like it is just hard to do, at this point. VMWare has been working on it and at this point it isn't even "experimental" in the latest version of VMWare Workstation. Well it works... kinda. It's fairly slow and there are some rendering errors. I can get WoW to run, but it isn't all that playable.
I've been watching this sort of thing with interest since old games are one of the things I'm very fond of. However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
i am able to play sof2 fullscreen with high specs on my xp virtualmachine, running in gentoo. 3d accel works great. still iffed about starcraft not stretching to screen-size though -_____-
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This can be done well, it just hasn't yet been done well on a Linux host.
Re:I wouldn't count on it (Score:4, Funny)
"...not something that can be used for serious gaming."
WTF?
Sorry, I didn't know I was speaking to a "professional". :-/
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
"Experimental" generally means "full of tons of bugs."
Not necessarily. Recently companies have been redefining what words like "experimental", "beta", and "release" mean. Just look at GMail (the obvious example).
My main point is that the software may not be as bad as we think.
Re:I wouldn't count on it (Score:5, Informative)
However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
It makes no sense to lump OpenGL and Direct3D together as "3D" when you're talking about VirtualBix, since they are implemented in very different ways.
VirtualBox OpenGL is basically just as pass-thru to the host driver. The guest box additions includes a virtual OpenGL driver that just passes the commands thru to the the host and the real driver. There must be some performance hit, but the approach seems simple enough.
VirtualBox Direct3D is implemented using the WINE driver that converts Direct3D calls into OpenGL which then get tunneled through to the host OpenGL driver as in the OpenGL case. VirtuaBox Direct3D should therefore be similar in functionality to that in WINE. One upside to the approach is that you don't need a Windows host to have D3D guest aceleration.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem, as I understand it, isn't that 3D hardware is difficult to handle in a VM (it's not, really, you simply paravirtualise calls to the 3D hardware and translate them into libGL calls in the VM host software). The problem is that doing so in Windows is practically impossible, because of MS's licensing terms for the DDKs you need. Smart move on their part, of course, if Paravirtual D3D was considered a first-order citizen of windows in the same way that NVidia or ATI D3D was, then nobody would hav
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Passing OpenGL calls through is easier, and has actually been done for a while now. Reimplementing DirectX is considerably harder, I think they used Wine code for a lot of that.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenGL already supports network transparency, you could potentially just use that existing functionality to deliver the GL calls over a local interface to the local host...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenGL already supports network transparency
OpenGL is device-independent, so you get network transparency for free. That's not really the same thing no matter what the SGI FAQ says. OpenGL lacks a networking component, so to say it has network transparency is a bit disingenuous. X11 has network transparency, which is why OpenGL has it in practice... but it's not part of OpenGL.
The big win for me (Score:2)
It can use FreeBSD as a host O/S.
Re: (Score:2)
There has been an unsupported port for a little while now which except for some network and cdrom issues seemed to do ok.
That said, i don't see 3.0 out on freshports yet. Where did you see 3.x is supported officially?
Virtual box (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
I don't game so open GL means squat to me.
Re:Virtual box (Score:4, Informative)
.. then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
If you can figure out how to browse the *whole* network in Windows, which IIRC isn't immediately obvious, you can do it in the GUI (and in fact don't even need to map a drive - just save shortcut.) Right clicking on network neighbourhood and saying "explore" is the trick, I think. Alongside the "Microsoft Windows Network" object there's a "VirtualBox Shared Folders" which contains all the shared folders.
But you're right, I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to make the appropriate window pop open automagically.
What you say "should be true". It says so in the virtual box manual. How I found the devices did not show up in the network neighbor hood. So I had to use the run command. I admit I was baffled by the network neighborhood on windows. it seems like their are different views of varying completeness depending on how you get the explorer window (or whatever it's called) to bring it up. So it could be that I'm just a windows spaz. but I don't think so. I think windows is simply unreliable when exploring
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Gaming isn't the only thing that uses OpenGL.
3D content creation comes to mind (blender, maya, 3dstudio, etc)
But, as well, some audio programs I've used can use it for their UI (flstudio...)
To hell with OpenGL and Direct3D (Score:2)
When the hell are they going to support GRE over NAT? Some of us don't have any choice -- our company uses PPTP VPNs.
Re: (Score:2)
Could you not just use bridged mode (or "host interface networking" or whatever it's called this week) instead of NAT?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Odd protocols, like GRE?" .. not a network guy, are you? Should I use a standardized, widely implemented protocol like GRE, or a single-implementation solution like OpenVPN. Don't get me wrong, I love OpenVPN and thing those guys have a fantastic cross-platform solution ... but GRE isn't exactly an "odd protocol".
Hmmm
Not perfect but pretty good (Score:5, Interesting)
w00t! Kidz are Happy! (Score:2)
Maybe not now.
It worked great when they were younger and Tux Paint, SuperTux, Chromium, TORCS, TuxRacer were what they wanted, but now they NEED to play the "in" gamez.
<sigh>
I'll just go back to playing my games on Stella and GFCE.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel for you. I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to beat an Access 2000 VBA application into submission. I've got the current holes plugged, but next Monday I'm telling the guy I'm doing the work for that I'd rather recode it in Lisp than ever ever ever have to deal with VBA again. All VBA and VB ever did was allow people who had no business programming to create programs, and somehow so many of those programs ended up outlasting the original guys who made them.
BILLY MAYS HERE (Score:4, Funny)
You've got problems, we all know what it's like not being able to develop on windows - but you can't seem to give up counterstrike! Notepad carriage return issues, archaic command line functions, the works - all gone in a jiffy with Virtualbox(tm)!
Want to pwn noobs from the comfort of a linux environment!? No problem. Toss xp on there, Bam! It's done!
Want to show people your awp skills while still being able to strace!? Easy as boom-headshot with virtualbox!
Call now and for no extra cost we'll throw in the latest jre for absolutely free!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally? I've been doing that in VMware for ages (Score:3, Informative)
The Direct3d support is not designed for gaming, but it works for the most part. I have found a few games which do not work, Fallout 3 America's Army 3, but also many which do work, Counter Strike Source America's Army 2 Team Fortress 2 Rise of Nations.
Re:Finally? I've been doing that in VMware for age (Score:3, Interesting)
Games are the last bastion for a seperate Windows install.
The audio stuff (Reason, FLStudio) etc work perfectly well under VirtualBox now.
You need to use ASIO4ALL to get asio working, but once done and fiddled with... hah! 10ms audio latency in a freakin' virtual machine! That is just so awesome to me!
Anyone try X-Wing/Tie Figher/XvT ? (Score:3, Funny)
This could be the upgrade I've been waiting for... now all I have to do is dig up an old copy. Has anyone tried it already?
Help!! DIY X-Wing install (Score:4, Funny)
I got DOSBox in VirtualBox, and a copy of X-Wing, but it is tricky reading the old floppies with modern hardware. With a bit of determination, I was able to insert a mini usb plug in under the sliding metal thingy on the disk, but the computer still can't work.
At first I thought it was the host OS lacking the correct drivers, but then I realised that floppies are much slower than usb drives, so they need to operate at a lower frequency. If I could just up the frequency, I could read the data!
Okay, here are the numbers. A high speed floppy would get around 500 Kbps tops and the USB transfer is around about 29.5 Mbps, so the floppy is around 1.7% the speed of the USB. So if I increase the speed of the USB connection by 59 times, I should get the USB to read the floppy correctly. Now a microwave oven works at 2.45 Ghz, so I figured that, seeing that that is ~83 times the speed of the USB, with a little bit of duct tape and some copper foil sheilding the usb cable, I could get the increase I needed in the floppy without over doing it.
So I put the floppy with the cable inserted in it and wrapped in copper foil and duct tape into the microwave, jammed the safety switch with a plastic spoon so I could run it with the door open (don't worry, I sat behind the microwave) and plugged it into the computer. Then I quickly turned the microwave on and read the data coming from the cable.
It didn't work first time, but that was because the USB wasn't acting like a drive, so the computer could "read" it. Unfortunately it was so fast that it blew up the usb port (I think, it wont read my thumb stick).
So then I opened up an old flash drive (32MB) which I have filled with 0x00 and carefully attached the chip to the disk surface with a spot of hot glue. When I plugged it in, the computer recognized it as "removable media", so I again started the microwave to spin up the disk frequency. This time there was more smoke, not just from the microwave (to be expected), but also from the usb port!!!
Can anyone help me with the right number of winds of duct tape needed to slow the floppy frequency from the 41.5Mbps I am getting to the 29.6 Mbps I need? I think the extra speed is causing overload, I am running out of USB ports and I just got a nosebleed. Also, does anyone have another copy of X-Wing? Mine is a bit worn :-(
Parent
Data loss bug (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, looks like they still haven't fixed bug 1040 [virtualbox.org], or even upgraded its priority from 'minor.' The gist of it is, do not even think about touching anything in the GUI relating to the 'snapshot' feature, unless you really, absolutely, positively understand what you're doing. The wording is very confusing, and can easily lead to data loss scenarios. Unfortunately, since this is a human interface flaw, and not a programming error, it seems like it's not really being taken seriously. In my mind, sadly, this is exactly the sort of macho hacker mentality that keeps OSS from mainstream acceptance.
Changing from VMware to VirtualBox (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool! After the umpteenth million time of not being able to build VMware Server under the latest kernel version, and this time NOT being able to find yet-another-vmware-any patch to fix it, I finally abandoned VMware (at least for personal use) and switched back to VirtualBox. Looks like I made the right decision right, just in time.
I'm still using VMware for server virtualization at work, but for running one of Uncle Bill's products on my desktop, it looks like VirtualBox is a better solution.
I will be interested in seeing how it works with USB. That's always been a bug-a-boo for me--getting USB devices to talk to the VM. This release sounds like they've cleaned up some things. I will be really interested in how it performs with some of my games that require 3D. (I'm talking like Guild Wars, not the latest releases.)
Not stable (Score:3, Insightful)
See here: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19352 [virtualbox.org]
Other than that, VirtualBox is very polished in general. 3D is just not a feature that works yet, and should not be used in a production environment.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It only works on Windows guests. Only DirectX is supported, not OpenGL.
Re:Vmware (Score:5, Informative)
I remember VMware implementing this several months ago. It was experimental, I don't know about it's status right now.
Ummm... actually, it's been a feature in VMWare for several years... It was experimental in VMWare 5.0 [vmware.com] but it has been standard in the past three major releases: 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5. FWIW, VMWare tends to do major updates in 0.5 increments and you can go from 5.0->5.5 and 6.0->6.5 for free... It's a nice way for only paying for half your major upgrades. Minor upgrades are a smaller decimal value added on (i.e. 5.51, 5.52, etc) and those are always free.
Parent
Re:Vmware (Score:4, Insightful)
The Server product, which is free, does not support the more interesting graphics APIs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's why the Direct3D bit is a big deal. Direct3D is the 3D part of DirectX.
Re:Does this even matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, hopefully this could put people over the edge to use Linux full-time (myself included). Many people currently use Windows for gaming, and don't dual-boot because it's a hassle. If I could run in Linux 24/7, and run my games without rebooting, either in a VM or in Wine, that would be excellent.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interestingly enough, both WIndows 7 and VirtualPC come from Redmond, WA.
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Actually, modern AMD and Intel chipsets do include an IOMMU. This does for devices what the MMU does for processes; gives each one its own virtual address space which is mapped to the physical address space.
The original motivation for this was using 32-bit devices on a 64-bit system. The first machine that I'm aware of to include an IOMMU was an early SPARC64 system. Sun wanted to ship it with a cheap 32-bit NIC, but this had problems when you have a machine with more than 4GB of RAM. If you send net