Maciej Sołtysiak wrote:
Hello David,
Tuesday, August 8, 2006, 1:23:01 AM, you wrote:
Sounds good. I don't have an ubuntu to test with at the moment, though.
Well, both MS Virtual PC and VMWare are free of charge, so installing
is a real snap.
Under what, though? I don't want MS crap on my OS X (need that for work
ATM), and I can't imagine they've ported it to Linux. I have no reason
to boot Windows except for games, and if I was going to do that, I may
as well shrink my Windows partition to make room for a native install.
Which would be fine, but it's a lot of work when I don't run Ubuntu
normally.
I'd be willing to test on the one Ubuntu server I run, but it's across
the country until next week, and also work-critical.
Not to nitpick, but isn't that emulation? Or have they actually done
real virtualization yet?
I don't know the differences, can you shed some light? AFAICS M$ will
be shipping Virtual PC with Vista to allow people run older software
under virtual machines. (be it virtualized or emulated)
Still hard to say.
Virtualization splits up the real hardware. It's like a scheduler, only
for OSes. Emulation is more like an interpreter -- it reads each
instruction and then executes something that does the same thing.
Emulation can work from any arch to any arch, so Rosetta (allowing PPC
OS X apps to run on OS X86) is emulation.
Emulation is usually at least 2x slower than native. Virtualization
usually approaches native for CPU stuff, but at least disk IO and
graphics usually have to be emulated -- so no 3D acceleration, so no
games under a guest OS.
If MS wanted to do the best possible thing for their consumers, they'd
give you a free XP under VirtualPC with Vista, and actually do
virtualization. If M$ wanted to make it even more likely for people to
want to upgrade to Vista, they might deliberately make it cost tons of
money and make it emulation, so that XP looks slower, and native Vista
apps look so much faster that people complain until everything works on
Vista.
If Virtual PC is emulation, maybe Virtual Server 2005 R2 (also free of
charge) is virtualizaton.
I have no idea what Virtual Server is.
