On 8/20/22 12:30 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
Long-story-short; I run ArcaOS (backwards compatable OS/2 successor) as a guest on QEMU on my desktop.
Aside: Is ArcaOS really a different version of OS/2? Or is it still 4.x with patches and updated drivers? I saw extremely little difference, other than eye candy / included open source packages, between IBM OS/2 Warp 4.5x, eComm Server, and ArcaOS.
Further Aside: I run anything in the above to be able to drive my P/390-E PCI card.
The Lenovo Thinkpad has the "vmx" cpu flag, so QEMU is theoretically doable. But the mouse is extremely flakey, to the point of unusability, under QEMU on the Thinkpad. I've tried various tweaks, but no luck. I "asked Mr. Google", but only found other people with the same problem... and no solution.
This sounds extremely reminiscent of guest OS driver / utility integration, or rather the lack there of, when running OS/2 et al. in VM.
Are there any booby-traps to watch out for? What I'm most concerned about is the default "qt5" USE flag. Is VirtualBox usable without the qt5 GUI?
I've not fond much effective difference in the various hyper visors, save for driver / guest OS additions / integration maturity level. Sure, different hyper visors have varying maturity levels of the management utilities. But I've gotten all of them to do what I want. I prefer VirtualBox on stand alone workstation for lab / play thing and VMware's (free) ESXi on my server for things I want running months at a time (read: to continue running when I reboot my workstation to change kernels).
I assume that since you're running ArcaOS, that you have support from Arca Noae. As such, I'd open a support ticket with them and ask about guest add-ons for various hyper visors.
I don't know the current state of 3rd party guest add-ons for OS/2 / eCS / ArcaOS under VirtualBox. Hopefully they've improved since the last time I looked.
Surprisingly enough, I think the best integration that I ever saw was under an *OLD* version of Microsoft's Virtual PC / Virtual Server / Hyper-V. Back when they still supported OS/2 as a guest OS in an official capacity. Perhaps you can run an old version thereof or extract the guest add-ons therefrom and use them elsewhere.
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
