Rubénerd :)

Like the way it turned out, but guess I should have cleaned the fingerprints off the screen first!

After I had decided to replace Arch Linux with the latest version of FreeBSD on my Armada M300 (reasons for another post), I decided during the partitioning stage to save 512MiB of space. Why? So that instead of relegating my DOS nostalgia to virtual machines on my MacBook Pro I could dual boot this subnotebook with it! Genius right? Don’t answer that.

When I first bought Connectix Virtual PC (Wikipedia) for my first iMac back in the day it came with a fully licenced ISO disc image of IBM PC DOS 2000 which essentially was PC DOS 7 with Y2K and Euro character support, so this morning I burned a copy of it to disc and loaded it up!

Even 2002 era, 600MHz hardware with 320MiB of RAM is still ridiculously high for DOS so it loads instantly. I’m also pleasantly surprised by how much of it works right out of the box! The generic drivers for the CD-ROM let me access the optical drive in the docking station; the bundled MOUSE.COM detects and lets me use the touchpad; and the bundled HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE can assign high memory without any the problems I had when running PC DOS in VirtualBox. When I’ve had more time to play around with it (and when I swap in UMBPCI, Cute Mouse etc) I’ll post my experiences here. Suffice to say preliminary results are extremely encouraging.

Before anyone comments here asking why, I decided not to use FreeDOS because their Windows 3.x support is still in the experimental stage and it’s still has some issues with some old games. Even though we also still have a valid licence for MS-DOS 6.22 I also chose not to use it because PC DOS 7 has some really nice features that can save much more conventional memory, plus it comes with all the tools Microsoft omitted from MS-DOS 5 like the DOSSHELL and I prefer the IBM E Editor to MS-DOS EDIT. I’m also intrigued by REXX having never used it before.

I think it was my good friend Felix Tanjono who said on Twitter that no amount of virtualisation is good enough, sometimes you just have to go all the way and dual boot! I agree. There’s something cool about being asked whether you want to boot PC DOS or FreeBSD… the first OS I used versus the latest. I’m a sucker for symbolic crap like that.

So what’d you do on your Sunday? ^_^

FreeBSD 7.1 with Xfce, MS-DOS with XTreeGold and Windows 2000

In my quest to find the most useful virtualisation software for Mac I’ve so far used Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion and Q.app in various capacities. Today I decided to take a closer look at VirtualBox, the free and open source virtualisation software by Sun Microsystems.

Firstly the good news: VirtualBox is fast. Because it can take advantage of VT-x in the Intel processors of modern Macs the performance is in an entirely different league to QEMU based applications and much closer in performance to expensive (at least in the eyes of a university student!) commercial products from VMware and Parallels.

Because of it’s higher performance, VirtualBox can run all current flavours of BSD, Linux and Windows that I’ve thrown at it just beautifully. Creating machines is a snap, and the shortcut keys for commands such as hard reset (command-R) are the best of any Mac virtualisation product I’ve used.

Unfortunately for me there have been some problems. For starters, considering it’s a Sun product I found it disheartening to find OpenSolaris 08.11 can’t pass the initial boot stage to install without giving an error which is a shame. FreeBSD has difficulty using the emulated optical drive which in practical usage is fine but it means you need to initally install over a network, no easy install of an ISO is possible. And for my electronic nostalgia, VirtualBox crashes whenever I attempt to load either the EMM386 or UMBCPI upper memory managers in MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 2000 despite exhaustive attempts to map the correct memory addresses.

As I said on my Q.app review, my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro seems to be a very quirky machine for virtualisation: it seems to have troubles than most Apple people don’t seem to have! Keeping this in mind I’m ready to chalk these problems up to my eccentric machine, but it’s still a bit disheartening.

VirtualBox has the potential to be an amazing product, and certainly for Windows and Linux it does the job beautifully — especially for the price! Unfortunately for my own current needs though I’m going to have to give it a pass; while it does run Windows 2000 amazingly well I’d prefer not to have to use several higher end virtualisation products for different things.