Re: [tlug] VMWare/Virtualserver free

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Alain" == Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com> writes:

    Alain>     One criticial factor is the ease of installing Windows
    Alain> on Xen?

Gah.  On TLUG I guess I'll be forgiven for ignoring that detail, but
yes, indeed, that is a sticking point.  As I understand the situation,
it's worse than you say: you need to pull the _Windows_ sources out
and build your own version of _Windows_.  (This is a problem with the
Coda distributed file system too; *they* can build and distribute
*binaries* because it's effectively a loadable device driver in the
Windows architecture which requires an expensive proprietary SDK and
knowledge of proprietary internals, so AFAIK it's not possible for
third parties to build a venus for Windows.)

As pointed out later in the thread Xen 3.0 plus hardware
virtualization support will win, but Xen 3.0 is nowhere near complete
or stable yet AIUI.

    Alain>     But if you don't need Windows or <insert some random OS
    Alain> with no Xen at all, then Xen seems to be a better choice.

AFAIK Windows is the only one that matters; you can run Quartz on top
of a home-brew Darwin kernel.

But (much as I hate to admit it :-) Windows support matters, a lot.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.