[TriLUG] Run two OS simultaneously

[Jaimie Livingston]

What you are looking for is known as either an x86 or IA-32 emulator. The only open-source
IA-32 emulator I think worth considering at the moment is BOCHs, found at
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/.

There are other open source VM technologies available, but most of them are not being
developed to support Windows on Linux, but are rather being developed to support
Linux-on-Linux clustering or server consolidation like you might find in a virtual
web-hosting operation. IMO, the most notable of these is User Mode Linux (UML) found at
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/index.html.

There are some old articles that might point you to more useful information:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/16/1930207
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/18/2025249

In reality, I almost have to recommend VMWare for what you seem to want. AFAIK, VMWare is
the only complete Linux VM that supports independent Windows and Linux (among others) VM's
simultaneously. I've used it a lot in the past, and currently use VMWare Workstation v4 at
home to keep up to date and experiment with different OS's in a controlled, non-production
environment. I do recommend that the system hosting VMWare have enough RAM to allocate at
least 256MB of RAM to each VM plus whatever amount of RAM the host OS requires, and a fast
HDD subsystem. Also, don't expect to be able to play any resource intensive games or 3D
modeling applications in VMWare, since VMWare emulates video and sound devices.

Good luck. Let us know how thing's work out.

Jaimie


> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org 
> [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Wesley Zhang
> Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 9:59 PM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: [TriLUG] Run two OS simultaneously
> 
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I would like to run two OS (win2k and linux) simultaneously 
> in same box. 
> VMWare may serve such purpose, before I dive into VMWare, I 
> would like 
> to explore any alternatives and their pro/cons, especially 
> similar open 
> source projects if there is any.
> 
> Thanks,
> Wesley
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