Windows Virtual Machines Kalhmera kosme.
I'm at the library right now and our NT workstations do not have international keyboard "drivers" installed. So I have to write Greeklish. Elvis PS > On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 at 16:44:48 +0200, Pablo Saratxaga wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 05:55:18AM -0700, Elvis Presley wrote: > > Conclusion: vterms and xterms are redundant, so there is no good reason to run them both at the same time. And xterms are more flexible. > Yes, but there is a big difference: xterms need a running X terminal; vterms don't. Can you help me out? I don't have a Linux PC. Do vterms and xterms run together on a real system, on your system? > > Still, the keyboards are the same, so both could share the same, better(=X) 'keymaps' fsm. > The way the keyboards are handled is quite different (on X11 there is a high hardware abstraction; while the linux keyboard on console interacts directly with the kernel. So, it looks like you get a console from the kernel whether you want one or not. I'm thinking of those virtual terminal "emulator" processes. It's gotta be possible to emulate an xterm in a vterm, then neanderthals like me can use their stone tools. > > I meant to say "utf-8". The irony is that utf-8 also blew up the Latin-1 characters. Now everything (but English) is twice the size. (That's not true, only the accented vowels are.) > And some are 3 bytes long, and some other are 4 bytes long,... But who cares? What matters is the ability to type any letter used in any human written language. That is a very huge improvement. I agree. I'm on your side. > > > > Why do Greek newspapers still use ISO 8859-7? > > > > For the same reason that a majority of English language web sites still use windows-1252, I suppose. > > > http://www.dolnet.ta-nea.gr/ is still producing alot of new material, > [unknown adress] Sorry about that. The url is: http://ta-nea.dolnet.gr/ They don't use the 'www' prefix as an alias, and I keep forgetting their parent company name, 'dolnet'. (I asked them to register 'tanea.gr' but they haven't.) The Communist Party newspaper is: http://www.rizospastis.gr/ They have a much nicer name, and they also have a 'text-only' link which does not download images, just the text. You can get the entire daily newspaper through http. (Only I don't know if they are using unicode, but I assume not, it's probably ISO 8859 too. You see? I've become skeptical.) > > > > Is there a version of Linux which runs as a Microsoft Window (not cygwin)? > > > > ?? What you say doesn't make sense. (you can on the other hand run an > operating system inside of a virtual computer box inside another operating > system) > > > I should have asked, "Is there a version of Microsoft Windows which will run a copy of Linux?" > It doesn't make any more sense in the other way either :) > Both MS-Windows and Linux are operating systems, you can run one, or the other, not one inside the other; they are built in order to run at the very bottom in direct interaction with the hardware. > They can be run inside an emulated hardware box, but not as normal programs. > > Microsoft describes Windows as a "virtual-machine" operating system, and DOS does, indeed, run, as an operating system in a window. > I never read of MS-Windows described as a "virtual-machine"... And what runs "in a window" is in fact command.com, which is the equivalent (in much less powerful) of /bin/bash > > I assume a VxD would map/share the PC hardware, controlled by Windows, to the device drivers in the Linux kernel. > No, the linux kernel needs direct access to the hardware. What you need is to emulate an entire system, like vmware does. I haven't been able to determine exactly what vmware does from their website, too proprietary, too hush-hush, but I assume they write VxDs which map the Linux kernel to the Windows VMM, and the real hardware. Someone once told me their product ran on the NT platform, but not Windows 98, but it was quite expensive. (All hearsay. No personal experience.) The heart of the Windows operating system is called the VMM(=Virtual Machine Manager). There are alot of descriptions out there, like http://win32assembly.online.fr/vxd-tut2.html When the VMM is running an instance of DOS, you get direct access to the DOS INT21 interface. Your program can even write directly into display memory, just like the old days, when your program owned the console. The VMM manages to control access to the real display, by remapping the "real" memory(=the virtual memory address space) used by DOS, which still has that weird 20-bit memory line. Even 32-bit protected-mode programs designed to run under a DOS extension called "???extenders???" --I forget the jargon-- still run in a DOS Window. Microsoft has managed to recreate the entire the DOS OS, not just command.com. I think you could host Linux, if you had the right VxDs. The VMM remaps the i486 ports used by the hosted OS's device drivers, so when the Linux kernel writes to port addresses, the VMM traps them in a VxD, which manages real hardware. Even the IRQ lines of the processor are emulated by the VMM, so hardware interrupts are trapped too. 32-bit Windows programs run in a "System VM", which is a bit more like a "monitor" than a (Unix) process. The IBM SP(="System Product") VM Operating System ran on mainframe hardware. Their VM hosted single-user systems called CMS(=Conversational Monitor System), but it could also run multiple copies of it's mainframe OSes, MVS, and DOS/VSE. I wonder if it could run another copy of VM in a VM. Each SP/VM got a 'mini-disk' which would be akin to a 'partition' under DOS/Unix, so the Linux disk driver could be fooled into thinking it was accessing it's own disk unit. It's fascinating technology, but you'd need inside information to make it work. Google isn't enough. Given enough time, I'm sure these VxDs will appear out of nowhere, as freeware or sharewhare or whatever it's called. > > Did you know Microsoft has removed unicode support from their accessory program, Wordpad, in Windows XP? > That seems particularly stupid a move. I should have said, "unicode text file support." Wordpad still does unicode, but only in Word format, not as a text file, so I can still edit a document in unicode, but I have to copy and paste it into a unicode editor to create a text file. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
