[TriLUG] review of bochs and plex86

[Andrew C. Oliver]

Hi all,

I've currently got an evaluation of VMWare thats about to run out.  I'm 
quite impressed with it and may indeed purchase a copy.  However, I'd 
prefer an opensource alternative.  So I stumbled across bochs and 
plex86.  Apparently at one time they were basically one project.

bochs is on sourceforge at (suprise!) bochs.sourceforge.net or 
sourceforge.net/bochs.  Plex86 is at www.plex86.org.

The have slightly differing goals.  plex86 is inteded to be more like 
vmware an x86 only.  Bochs is intended to be platform independant (or at 
least run platform independantly) while emulating an x86.

Bochs is further along then plex86.  I can boot it and start the windows 
98 install.  However, no mouse support is available as of yet.  (there 
is but it says "DONT USE THIS" and that its not supported anywhere it 
needs to be).  The installation gets part way through and then crashes. 
  Bochs can fully run dos (as far as I can tell) though.

Plex86 is pretty early along in many ways and most of the more mature 
code is taken right from bochs.  Plex86 promises greater performance 
once its finished and will probably have greater stability (its easier 
to create a vm for the hardware you're running on when you are running 
on that hardware already.)

However as it stands, I did get plex86 to boot dos as well (after 
several attempts to pick the right set of code and actually having to 
find pieces that were in the wrong place via the makefile).  It just 
crashes before the first gui screen comes up in the windows 98 setup. 
Currently plex86 by my count is WAY slower then bochs.

All in all neither of these are ready to use even for my limited purpose 
(run excel and biffview), but both seem to be promising.  I'd bet my 
money on plex86 in the long term as the bochs founder left (more or 
less) the bochs project to work on plex86, however bochs is one of the 
most active projects on sourceforge.

All in all it looks like I will be buying vmware, but maybe one day I'll 
be able to upgrade to bochs or plex86.

Through all my fiddling I must say.. I didn't crash my system!  I'll 
certainly be sending my comendations and best wishes to the authors, but 
I'll have to wait to use these for more serious work.

-Andy
-- 
www.superlinksoftware.com
www.sourceforge.net/projects/poi - port of Excel format to java
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4487555.html
			- fix java generics!