[9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Robert Raschke]

Hi,

I have recently found the need to use P9 in a Windows only environment
(new job).  I thought I'd "just" use VMWare for that.  But it turns
out I seem to have just missed my window of opportunity, as VMWare are
quite agressively not wanting to let me use version 4.5, but insist I
(and everyone else from now on, as far as I can see) use version 5.

I don't have much time on trying to make P9 work on VMWare 5, so I was
wondering if anyone on this list has any ideas how I could persuade
VMWare to sell me a 4.5 license?

I didn't get very far in trying out version 5 yet (somebody else was
having difficulties as well on this list, if I remember correctly).  I
guess I'll have another go at some point ...

Thanks for any pointers,
Robby

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Ronald G. Minnich]

does qemu run on windows at this point? I still don't think that given the 
existence of Xen and qemu ports, that VMWare is worth the trouble.

ron

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Derek Fawcus]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 09:00:56AM -0600, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> 
> does qemu run on windows at this point? I still don't think that given the 
> existence of Xen and qemu ports, that VMWare is worth the trouble.

Purportedly.  Some of the features (the console / monitor switch) were added
specifically for windows.

DF

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Robert Raschke]

ron wrote:
> does qemu run on windows at this point? I still don't think that given the 
> existence of Xen and qemu ports, that VMWare is worth the trouble.

I haven't yet looked at qemu, but Xen is a non-starter for me, as I'm
constrained to Windows and can't change that.  Luckily, at home most
things are lovely Plan 9.

I'll investigate qemu.  I managed to get VMWare5 past the hanging
stage by moving the CD to SCSI (as is suggested in the wiki for
version 4), but now have vga hell.  Yamanashi Takeshi pointed out that
there might be VESA support, but then I'm still not clear on how to
bootstrap my way in.  I guess console and ed would get me started.

I am finding that I have been infiltrated by the acme virus.  I've
turned into one of these people who are rabid about the editor they
love, oh no ;-) Spending 8 hours a day in front of a machine that does
not support mouse chording et al.  is proving to be hard.  (I've
managed to accidentally close down applications due to unwitting use
of mouse buttons in Windows.) OK, I'll stop whining now.

Robby

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[David Leimbach]

On 4/19/05, Robert Raschke <rrplan9@tombob.com> wrote:
> ron wrote:
> > does qemu run on windows at this point? I still don't think that given the
> > existence of Xen and qemu ports, that VMWare is worth the trouble.
> 

QEMU is particularly good on linux with the kqemu accelerator for
linux.  I've had a good bit of luck with it.

Dave

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[C H Forsyth]

currently just `stupid web browser' mode.
i don't yet know what it expects for the full mode.
something awful, probably.

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Russ Cox]

> To be honest, I can't recall what the -L option does and I didn't test
> the audio, and 54 MB of RAM is a little lean, but it was easily enough
> to boot.  I've found that QEMU often errors out if the guest OS isn't
> given a hard drive image, possibly from drive probe failure, but the
> drive size does not need to be large if you'll be running live from CD
> or floppy.

The need for a disk image might be fixed.

> the virtual machine.  I have found some guest OSes have trouble
> determining the drive geometry under QEMU and you end up having to do
> something like 'qemu -hdachs 8367,16,63 c.img' to get everything
> working.  They also seem to tweak the command line options from
> version to version, so you may find other options that either change
> or improve behavior under Windows.

Plan 9 doesn't need -hdachs, for what it's worth.
 
> Charon supports Gmail now, so I'm getting closer....

It does !?!?  In full mode or in Gmail's "stupid web browser" mode?

Russ

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Jack Johnson]

On 4/20/05, Kenji Okamoto <okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> Would you please give us your more detailed experience with Windows
> version qemu?   Is it easy to install them, how much of diskspace is
> neccessary etc.

QEMU has only a handful of necessary files, and they're all relatively small:

-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack       305152 Feb 23 14:58 SDL.dll
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack        65536 Feb 23 14:58 bios.bin
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack       781824 Feb 23 14:58 qemu.exe
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack        32768 Feb 23 14:58 vgabios-cirrus.bin
-rw-r-----    1 jack     jack        32768 Feb 23 14:58 vgabios.bin

These are all from the latest ReactOS version, which (zipped) weighs
in at around 10MB, because it includes a batch file and a
pre-configured disk image.

For my brief test, I just downloaded the latest Plan 9 ISO,
uncompressed it in the QEMU folder and changed the batch file to:

qemu -cdrom plan9.iso -boot d -m 54 -enable-audio -L . c.img

To be honest, I can't recall what the -L option does and I didn't test
the audio, and 54 MB of RAM is a little lean, but it was easily enough
to boot.  I've found that QEMU often errors out if the guest OS isn't
given a hard drive image, possibly from drive probe failure, but the
drive size does not need to be large if you'll be running live from CD
or floppy.

I have found that what should be the easiest part -- creating a file
for the drive -- is not always easy under Windows, and often find
myself resorting to the Cygwin tools to accomplish this.  I should
probably try 9pm.

I prefer using QEMU under Linux, if only to get direct access to an
entire drive (by using /dev/hdx as the C drive target) and because you
can configure a virtual network adapter to have a server running in
the virtual machine.  I have found some guest OSes have trouble
determining the drive geometry under QEMU and you end up having to do
something like 'qemu -hdachs 8367,16,63 c.img' to get everything
working.  They also seem to tweak the command line options from
version to version, so you may find other options that either change
or improve behavior under Windows.

On my machine at work Plan 9 booted surprisingly fast.  If you know of
a handy benchmark, I'd be happy to try it out and post the results.

On the flip side, I know we often talk/joke about porting Web
browsers, etc. to Plan 9 and I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to port
QEMU and then run something like Windows XP Embedded (if it's
supported) or Linux in a VM for those few apps you can't live without
(or port).  For me, that app is currently the Citrix client, so I'm
stuck with some officially supported OS for a while (or do the VNC hop
like everyone else does).

Charon supports Gmail now, so I'm getting closer....

-Jack

Re: [9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Kenji Okamoto]

> It might be interesting to get QEMU to boot a Plan 9 floppy and pull
> the filesystem off a fileserver.  I don't know if this would have any
> advantage over drawterm, other than testing.

I'm not a qemu user yet.
The drawterm uses devices of CPU server, and qemu uses local devices
(if it can use them☺), so it may be good for someone wants to use one,
such as audio device if possible.

Would you please give us your more detailed experience with Windows
version qemu?   Is it easy to install them, how much of diskspace is
neccessary etc.

Kenji

[9fans] slightly ot: how can I get vmware 4.5?

[Jack Johnson]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 09:00:56AM -0600, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> 
> does qemu run on windows at this point?

Aw, heck.

At the expense of being redundant, yes, QEMU does run on Windows.  I
haven't built the binary, but there are a lot of projects floating
various versions around.

I grabbed the one from the latest ReactOS release, which is version
0.6.2 but I'm not sure if all the earlier patches posted here were
applied to it.  I had success:

http://www.nas.com/~fragment/qemu.jpg

The odd black box in the upper left-hand corner disappears as soon as
the cursor is active.  Networking looks like it's going to work fine,
but I think the Windows version of QEMU only supports their user-mode
networking, so no virtual auth or CPU servers out there.

It might be interesting to get QEMU to boot a Plan 9 floppy and pull
the filesystem off a fileserver.  I don't know if this would have any
advantage over drawterm, other than testing.

Definitely not a chick magnet kind of thing.

-Jack