Alternative to Virtual PC??

S

sNYperfYre

Registered
I'm a bit of a Mac Newb. and I was wondering if anyone was using Wintel from OpenOSX?? I was using virtual PC for Linux and various windows platforms. But I wanted to know if wintel was any faster/slower than VPC??

Thanks in advance
 
It looks to me that Wintel is based heavily on Bochs. I've played with Bochs vs. VPC, and Bochs is much slower than VPC. IRRC, VPC uses a good deal of Altivec optimizations, whereas Bochs does not (at least the last time I looked).
 
Right, kenny. A colleague of mine has tried Bochs on his PowerMac Dual 1 GHz machine and tested it against VPC 6. No comparison, really.

However, it depends on the needs and the money. VPC costs money, so if all you do on a PC emulator is testing websites in IE for Windows, a Bochs solution might be okay.
 
Thanks for the note. I was gonna pick it up because it came with several Linux / FreeBSD variant's for distribution, which seemed really attractive. Run Red Hat Linux 8.0 in a VPC and it's sluggish and the terminal show's up really funny looking.

What do you think about Wintel for Linux??
 
Just a note on running Linux on VPC I have been running Redhat 8.0 here using Apples X server and it works really well. That is fire up VPC with the redhat image but do not run the xserver there on Linux. Rather use ssh -X to connect to it from the Mac and use X11 under OSX for the display.

I actually get acceptable performance this way and vpc only eats up about 30% of my CPU on my 667 mhz powerbook. The reason that this is such a win is that all of the graphics and display stuff is running natively on the mac and not being emulated in hardware under VPC and then copied out to the mac.

Just my $.02,

-Eric
 
Originally posted by lurk
Just a note on running Linux on VPC I have been running Redhat 8.0 here using Apples X server and it works really well. That is fire up VPC with the redhat image but do not run the xserver there on Linux. Rather use ssh -X to connect to it from the Mac and use X11 under OSX for the display.

I actually get acceptable performance this way and vpc only eats up about 30% of my CPU on my 667 mhz powerbook. The reason that this is such a win is that all of the graphics and display stuff is running natively on the mac and not being emulated in hardware under VPC and then copied out to the mac.

Just my $.02,

-Eric
Click to expand...

Lurk, How do you do that? how do you set things up to work that way? I'm fairly new to the Mac, Unix, linux world.

Thanks for any help
 
I'll pop in later today to explain it it is not hard but I just don't have the time now to spell out the details. In the mean time I have a little screen shot I took earlier this morning of that working here (200k):

VPC and Apple's X11

You will notice that under OpenGL I am getting framerates for glxgears around 500 FPS and at other times only 97 FPS. That is actually related to a bug in Apples OpenGL support where in some cases it is synchronizing the OpenGL redraw with the monitor's refresh and other times not. So when I am getting 500 FPS something like 85% of those frames are wasted computation because they never make it to the screen. But it is also nice to know that the slowest part of the pipeline is the monitor's refresh rate. ;)

-Eric
 
I have Wintel but haven't gotten to installing it. I'm curious about the part that you've to do something that sounds like making a partition/formatting part of your drive to install windows or what not. (It's not exactly formatting; it was in the manual for installing Win98 on Wintel). I'm concerned that if I want to undo/uninstall everything, I wouldn't know how to and I wouldn't be able to use the space (even though I have plenty).

I'm thinking of adding my old 10 GB hard drive as a secondary and installing Win98 there. I'll post followup when I have time to install it.
 
Originally posted by arden
On a side note: davez, how do you squeeze 1.5 Ghz out of a 933 Mhz G4?
Click to expand...

Opps:rolleyes: That's 1.5 GB of RAM. My Mac just works so well that I think of it as a much faster machine.
 
ust a note on running Linux on VPC I have been running Redhat 8.0 here using Apples X server and it works really well. That is fire up VPC with the redhat image but do not run the xserver there on Linux. Rather use ssh -X to connect to it from the Mac and use X11 under OSX for the display.
Click to expand...

Why would you need to do this, instead of simply using OS X's X11 directly? :confused:
If it's just for playing around with RedHat, OK, but IIRC you should be able to do almost anything you can do with RedHat (or other Linux distro's) with OS X's X11 ... right?
I'm approaching the point where I am using 50% Mac Apps & 50% X apps through X11 & Fink: no need for VPC here!
But I'm really curious what you use your setup for.
 
I can't really speak for what Lurk's doing, but there are some commercial packages that run on Linux, and are binary-only packages. For instance, running a WebLogic/WebSphere server for test/dev on this kind of thing would be perfect, given that neither BEA or IBM are likely to release MacOSX packages any time soon... :(
 
Originally posted by Cat
Why would you need to do this, instead of simply using OS X's X11 directly? :confused:
If it's just for playing around with RedHat, OK, but IIRC you should be able to do almost anything you can do with RedHat (or other Linux distro's) with OS X's X11 ... right?
I'm approaching the point where I am using 50% Mac Apps & 50% X apps through X11 & Fink: no need for VPC here!
But I'm really curious what you use your setup for.
Click to expand...

I have a couple of reasons one for the most important is that for work I have to test my software on both Linux and OS X (some other poor guy gets the Windows duties). This approach is a godsend in that case.

The other problem is that there are still lots of programs which have not been ported to OS X via Fink or other means or the port is way out of date. One recent example is that I wanted to try out a program called Sodipodi which is kind of an Illustrator workalike. The version in fink was old and had dependencies that conflicted with other stuff I had installed on my system. Either I needed to revert 40 packages in Fink breaking who know what to get the old version in Fink to work... or I could just run it from Linux. Laziness won out.

As for the trick to get that to work I had promised above. What you need to do is add an alias to your en0 interface for VPC to use. I got the info on how to do this from this board but now search I could cook up returned the page. I think it was you Kenny who originally posted this...

Make an alias for en0 using
Code: 
ifconfig en0 alias 192.168.111.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

Then configure the Linux image to use 192.168.111.2 as it ip and 192.168.111.1 as its gateway. If you want to turn on natting you can then get to the outside world from the Linux box but I only ever needed to go locally.

Fire up X11.app and then use ssh -X you@192.168.111.2 and you are good to go.

Hope that helps.
-Eric
 
OK, got your point. I was just wondering. For private use it would be a bit superfluous, but indeed for testing purposes etc. really usefull. Mmmh, interesting though ... now of course I've got to try it ... ;)
 
I'm installing Windows 98 on Wintel/Open OSX's Boch. All I can say is that after 5 hours and 2 nights of trying to install, I just want a good night's sleep. I'm going to quit this installation and put this away. If installation is this slow, then I'm not remotely interested in running anything on it. really.

anyone interested in this CD?

i'll wait to see if RealPC for OSX is any better. I'm just interested in using it for specialized purposes.

dw
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top