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

["Steve Crutchfield" scrutch@xxxxxxxx]

Chiming in here from a lurker who doesn't post much (but reads the
postings)...

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, 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.)

However, the programmers have been making progress. Just last week I
was able to work with developers to fix a nasty bug that caused the
Windows version to crash the entire operating system.

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).

Steve Crutchfield

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Steve.Crutchfield2@xxxxxxxx
>>> jr_fox@xxxxxxxx 07/07/04 5:54 PM >>>
Caballero wrote:

> Jordan, if it's in your sights anyway, please keep us abreast of
> developments of SVISTA, which I hadn't heard of.
>
> Carlo

Glad to. It is being put out by Serenity Systems, which develops &
distributes the
OS/2 successor, EcomStation. Early reviews found SVISTA to be slower
and generally
not as good as Connectix VPC (these products apparently have no code or
design in
common), but SVISTA is at a fairly early stage of development, so this
may not be a
fair comparison. Given some more time, who knows ? What is impressive
is the
announced roster of Host & Guest options, though several of these are
not yet
available. A Win-32 Host will be able to run an eCS or Linux (various
flavors)
virtual machine client, or you could be going in exactly the reverse
Host ==> Guest
direction. (These will be individual products, 1 --> 1, so you will
have to
choose.) As expected with an emulation scenario, there are definitely
hardware
horsepower requirements, the low end of which is probably not worth
exploring.
More speed cancels out more of the emulation overhead. I think you are
also
looking at 20G + in hard-drive space for such a setup.

There is also going to be a major price difference. Connectix VPC ran
about $300.
An SVISTA Host | Client package is supposed to run about $100., and you
can shave
some of that cost off by enrolling in their Open Beta program. I expect
to be
seeing an early demo in another week or so, and may get on board after
that,
depending.

Jordan