Re: We should [NOT] move en masse to Nota Bene (sorry Anne!)

[Raphael rtennenbaum@xxxxxxxx]

  
On 12/23/2012 03:10 PM, Bill Troop
   wrote:

  
  


  

   I don't know enough about the current hardware - - and
   would love
   to learn from an expert on that - - but isn't it basically
   possible to
   run a lot of independent OS's virtualized on the current Intel
   platform
   without excessive penalty? Meaning theoretically Linux, Win
   and
   Mac should be able to run in independent and non-conflicting
   spaces?
  

  
 

  Virtualization has become very big business, thanks to the need for
  the cloud to be configurable for multiple platforms, so it's always
  improving. XP under VirtualBox in Ubuntu is quite good, though for
  extremely bit-intensive work it is slow, so when I need to edit
  photos using the Nikon proprietary sw, I tend to boot XP natively.
  (Even under XP and a quad-core cpu, the Nikon stuff is awfully poky
  -- which is why I have started to move to RawTherapee, an
  open-source photo editor.)

 

  

   Is dosemu platform independent?

  
 

  It's open-source. Your question raises the interesting possibility
  that dosemu could be ported to other OSes. That there is no Windows
  or Mac version suggests that it's difficult -- plus it antedates
  DOSBox, for which there would never have been a need if dosemu was
  portable, but -- if you really want to use DOS under Windows these
  days, porting dosemu would be worth investigating. Once upon a time
  before FreeDOS you actually needed a version of MS-DOS or PC-DOS to
  run dosemu, so there might be licensing restrictions on the MS side;
  in fact I wonder if the reason DOSBox fails in some respects is due
  to the fact that it seeks to recreate DOS rather than use an actual
  DOS image.

 

  Using OS/2, whose DOS support was superlative, if the native DOS box
  couldn't cut it, you could dig up a DOS system floppy, copy its
  image to your hard disk, and then run it. I'm not going to say it's
  a trivial undertaking for any modern OS to do that, but what could
  the issue be? Certainly, however outmoded DOS APIs are, I cannot
  really believe they are so dangerous they present a genuine security
  risk or at any rate any that couldn't be sandboxed.