Re: SVISTA; was Re: OT: Query on mirroring...

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Steve Crutchfield wrote:

> I've been beta testing SVISTA for some time now. It's not quite "there"
> yet in terms of speed, flexibility, and usefulness. The emulation of
> eCS/OS2 on the Windows platform is pretty good right now - nearly on a
> par with Virtual PC. The emulation of Windows on an eCS/OS2 platform
> needs work: even on a fast machine Windows 2000 is pretty slow,

One reason I haven't been racing over to the beta testing group. (Plenty of
other things to keep me busy.) But it is still early in the SVISTA
development, so we should allow them some time. VPC was around for a long
time, going through a number of versions, before a lot of people tried it
and found it to be quite satisfactory.

> Windows
> 98 isn't supported yet, and nobody I know has been able to get
> networking to work (which means you can't yet share files between the
> host and guest OS, nor can you access the internet from the guest OS.)

Even if the latter was fully functional, one might want to seriously limit
the occasions and durations in which the system is allowed to see the
internet. This will (at least potentially) open the door to all sorts of
Windows nasties that OS/2 | eCS users have long been able to ignore with
impunity. For this reason, I'd be inclined to keep an alternate eCS boot
partition that is strictly business as usual, and not tricked out with
SVISTA. In fact, the SVISTA one would be the alternate, to be booted when I
know I'll be needing to use some Windows app.s.

> When the program is released, it is tentatively scheduled to sell for
> $99 for one host operating system, or $199 for three (Windows, eCS/OS2
> and Linux).

This is very reasonable, given what VPC had cost.


Jordan