Re: VMWare and GNU/HURD
Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 19, 1999 at 12:15:38PM -0400, David Andrews wrote:
> > I've successfully booted GRUB and Marcus' HURD tarball into a VMWare
> > virtual machine.
>
> Congrats. I told everybody that it may not work, because I read this
> somewhere, but if it works, that's actually good. More people will try the
> Hurd. Maybe I will try VM Ware, because I will need fewer reboots if i only
> want to try something within the Hurd.
>
> Thanks for your report!
Cool. That would make it feasible to try it on my big machine instead
of a 386... so much nicer. I'd have to buy vmware, alas. Tempting.
> > It occurs to me that a tar'ed VMWare virtual machine would make a
> > dandy development distribution for something like HURD -- iff the
> > developer is licensed to use VMWare. Of course, VMWare is commercial
> > software, not free, and should not be absolutely required for doing
> > development.
>
> Yes. :( Maybe Boch(sp?) will be ready at some time...
Bochs is also not free. It is, however, cheaper IIRC.
from http://www.bochs.com/LICENSE:
# According with the terms of this license, you may obtain,
# compile, install, and run BOCHS for up to 30 contiguous calendar
# days in order to test and evaluate the software. At the end of
# this period, you must either remove BOCHS from your systems or
# register your copies. You are allowed such an evaluation
# period once for any version of BOCHS, and no more than
# 2 versions may be 'evaluated' in any calendar year.
#
# The general registration fee for BOCHS is $25 per workstation,
# PC, or X-terminal, and should be paid by check in U.S. funds to:
Bochs is slower, but is written in portable C and will run on many
different machines. Tempting, again. (Not that I have a non-PC...)
Anyone care to try out bochs and the HURD?
The project you are thinking of is freemware, which is by the same
author and includes what he describes as the hard parts of bochs. It
will be LGPL. See http://www.freemware.org/. It has a long way to go.
The GNU guidelines used to say something like "we'll only use non-free
sofware if we're working on a free implementation", but this was back
when you couldn't run an all-free system. So if you use VMware, RMS
is liable to frown at you. I wish freemware worked... I wish I knew
enough to be useful...
Andrew Archibald
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