Update on VMware Challenge #1

I finally got my free VMware Workstation trial key, that was provided upon registration for the challenge, after two attempts. On the first attempt, I had accidentally left a character out of my e-mail address (it happens if your address is quite long - mine has 42 characters in total, including the '@' and '.' symbols), so the first e-mail bounced back to VMware. On the second attempt (this time verifying my e-mail address twice), despite VMware saying it'll take a day to arrive, my serial came in about 5 minutes.

Dungeon Master II on DOSBox on VMware

I've recently been testing some stuff on my VM, and decided to try the open-source DOSBox 0.63.
DOSBox works perfectly on VMware Server, with great performance. But I wanted to try something a little more complex, so I'd set up the old, popular Dungeon Master II on DOSBox to test things. First things first, the sound and video worked flawlessly. But DOSBox didn't like VMware Server's mouse drivers, so instead of displaying the custom cursor it should have, and letting me freely move the mouse anywhere, it displayed a huge Windows cursor when the mouse was active in DOSBox, and only let me move the cursor round the inside of the window, and not into the centre, or anywhere else inside it.
See the screenshot here:

The $200,000.00 VMware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge!

I've just signed up for the challenge. It seems quite interesting, but will my idea win?
The top prize is $100,000.00 (but $200,000.00 in prizes are promised altogether).
VMware are also providing a free copy of Workstation for use during the challenge period.
The details of the event are here.

Living in a (VMware) box

I've recently decided to take the plunge, and completely virtualize my day-to-day machine.
As with most things, it wasn't without problems...
I'd had a copy of VMware Workstation 5.5 evaluation floating about on my system, and used it on a daily basis. So I thought that I should start a big project, that to configure a virtual machine to house a Windows XP installation and my applications, inside a VM. As it was, XP installed without a hitch, and I'd set up my USB ADSL modem to work bridged to the VM. I could access the Internet and see files on the host, at the expense of having an active Internet connection (not a good thing, even with a hardware NAT). So I'd unshared all of the folders, and mounted them with Workstation's Shared Folders feature instead. So from then it was plain sailing, and the VM would dutifuly serve my needs - or so I thought. My VMware evaluation was due to expire in a few days, so I'd decided to use my copy of the brand new Server Beta.
The virtual machine ran perfectly, but I'd soon discovered that Server didn't support Shared Folders, so I had to play with the network settings in Server to get things working.
Eventually, I'd reached a compromise - I could access the Internet if I'd disabled the virtual networking adapter that was providing access to a selection of the host's files, but I couldn't use iTunes to listen to music in the VM.

TriangleOS

The little known GUI OS that boots from a floppy, TriangleOS works in VMware Workstation 5.5.
But only in "800x600x16bpp" mode. It's about 2-3 years old, but still interesting.
Get it here

As usual, the obligatory screenshots :)

This time, there's two:

BeOS 5 Developer Edition on VMware Workstation

As I've discovered today, despite popular belief, it is possible to install BeOS 5 in VMware Workstation, without any problems at all. The only thing is it took 2 hours to burn the CD (using the 1x speed-limited CDRwin demo, two strangely formatted ISOs and a CUE file).
Be warned, operating the cursor is hellishly slow during installation, and it's all in monochrome :(
But the operating system boots in full-colour glory :)

See the screenshot (click on image to see it for a better view):

Things Of Note #1

In a break from virtualisation, I've discovered that Microsoft possibly, don't trust their own products.
As shown in this screenshot, the Windows Defender Beta 2 doesn't even list Microsoft's OneCare Live software as 'classified':

Installing multiple operating systems on a single Virtual Machine with VMware Server

I'm currently running 3 operating systems on a single virtual machine, using VMware's new Server product. I've currently got FreeBSD (from the FreeSBIE live CD), Minix 3 and Ubuntu installed and running without any problems (apart from a deluge along the way). Providing a gateway to them all is the free XOSL 1.1.5 bootloader (official site currently offline).
4 virtual disk images are behind this configuration (1 IDE, and 2 SCSI).