OSNews

Running SVista

First try: Damn Small Linux

At first I have tried to boot some small live Linux distribution. For this purpose I have chosen Damn Small Linux which is a nifty lightweight live Linux distribution that fits on miniCD. Configuring virtual station is pretty straightforward: pick Linux as guest OS type, then point SVista to boot from ISO image of Damn Small Linux instead of physical CD-ROM drive, set the size of memory for the virtual machine, setup virtual hard drive (size and location), turn on networking support. After powering on virtual machine Damn Small Linux boots without problem.

Damn Small Linux running under SVista

Second try: Vector Linux

Next I have tried to install Vector Linux 4.0 to virtual hard disk under SVista. Vector Linux is small footprint Linux distribution aimed at low performance computers. First boot from ISO image of VL4.0, subsequent installation to virtual drive completed without problem. Then I set VM to boot from virtual hard drive. Again, Vector Linux comes up without problem. After that I have spent some time playing with Vector Linux, doing some compiles - performance looks good.

Vector Linux 4.0 install

Third try: DOS

Apart from Linux distros I have also run DOS (no screenshots here, everybody knows what does DOS look like :-). I have not tried Windows at the moment.

Performance

As this is beta software I have agreed not to publish benchmark comparisons at the moment, however I can say that SVista looks very promising. The beta version exhibited comparable performance to VMware and one can expect that the final version will bring further improvements and optimizations. I am eagerly awaiting the final production version.

License

SVista is commercial product. In detail, the user interface part will probably be released under some free license (possibly LGPL?) while the virtual machine core will be covered by commercial license.

Roadmap

According to Serenity Systems, Serenity Virtual Station will be probably released in the 2nd or early 3rd quarter of 2004. Several features like support of USB and sound devices are still under development - it is not clear whether these will be included in the first release or not. Later releases will also include the possibility of saving and restoring virtual machine state. Support for 2.6.x branch of Linux kernels will be added when the 2.6.x kernel becomes more widely used. A public beta version is planned in April 2004.

While this article is based on beta version of SVista which is still under development I can say that it looks very promising. The sooner there is another alternative of virtual machine software to pick from the better.

References

Serenity Virtual Station