FOSSwire

And out of left field, it's Nintendo! Never saw this one coming, did you?

The folks at OSNews have unearthed an interesting, not well-known discovery: Nintendo has released the "Nintendo ES" operating system, and not only that, but under an entirely free and open-source license.

The OS is written in C++, runs EMCAScript (JavaScript), uses Cairo for rendering, and as of recently, can run Squeak, a Smalltalk programming language implementation.

The official website includes screenshots, news, and some specifications, although it is all in Japanese. Google can come in handy.

The following screenshot is Squeak running on N-ES, virtualized with QEMU:

This project from Nintendo R&D is in very early development, but it could have a great amount of potential. No specifics are available as to what it can be used for or why it even exists, but we can only speculate. A Wii development kit? Unlikely, but possible.

"We propose an extensible component operating system architecture in which an operating system kernel uses reflection to process C++ pure virtual function based system calls and upcalls to provide a unified programming environment for application, server, and kernel development. We found that we could even develop file subsystems and a TCP/IP protocol stack on an existing operating system based on this architecture."

The free of charge VMware Server makes a great virtualisation solution. What's even better is that the server version runs on Linux. Just a quick note - VMware Server is not an open source product, unlike other Linux virtualisation solutions like Xen, OpenVZ, qemu and others.

You do need to register with VMware before they will give you a key to the free version, but once you have, it's pretty easy to get started.

In this tutorial, I'm going to be installing on CentOS 5, but the instructions here should work for most distributions.

Quick note - for CentOS 5, I had to install the following packages with yum before the install would work:

• xinetd
• gcc
• kernel-devel (or kernel-xen-devel if you're using the Xen kernel)

Head over to the download page and grab the .tar.gz version for Linux. It's about a 100 MB download, so sit tight.

Once it's downladed, extract it (I'm working on a machine without a GUI, so I'll be doing it command line style):

$ tar xzvf VMware-server-1.0.2-39867.tar.gz

Your version number may differ slightly. Once that's extracted, go into the directory it has created:

$ cd vmware-server-distrib

Now it's time to run the install script. This needs root privileges, so either use su -c or sudo, depending on your distribution. Here I'll use the former (and will continue to do so through the rest of this tutorial).

$ su -c "./vmware-install.pl"

You'll now enter the interactive install program. I usually accept most of the defaults here, as this installs everything into the default locations and makes it nice and easy to do.

Once you've done that through, you'll get this message:

Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by
invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl". Do you want this
program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]

Just hit enter here and we'll be in the final stage of setup. You'll have to read and agree to the licence agreement first, so press Enter, get reading then press q once you've read it all. Type yes when prompted and hit Enter.

Now the configuration script will go away and do a little configuring. Continue to accept the defaults for mimetype icons, application desktop menu entries and the application icon.

At this point, if you're lucky, VMware should find a kernel module and load it in. If not, you'll get this message:

None of the pre-built vmmon modules for VMware Server is suitable for your
running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmon module for
your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)? [yes]

Make sure you have the gcc and kernel-devel packages insalled on your system (if not, use yum to install them and restart vmware-config.pl). Press Enter.

VMware will go off and build a kernel module. If all goes well, you should move on to a question about networking. It's wise to choose yes for all of these, so you can use all the different network types for your virtual machines. Unless you know you don't need something, configure it anyway.

Once you've set up networking, the configuration tool will go off and compile some more stuff.

After that, you'll be asked which folder you want to store your virtual machines. This is completely up to you, but make sure you have enough disk space!

Finally, you'll be asked for your key that you got off the registration page earlier. Paste this in and finish the configuration.

You can now launch the VMware Server Console (or use the VMware Server client to connect to your new server from another machine). Enjoy!

A few days ago, I took a look at qemu as an open source virtualisation solution. I'm also hopefully going to take a look at Xen at some point.

However, there is also a relatively new free software virtualisation product, OpenVZ. Here's the official description:

OpenVZ is an Operating System-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. OpenVZ creates isolated, secure virtual environments — VEs (otherwise known as virtual private servers, or VPSs) on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VE performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VEs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files. See Documentation » Technology for more information.

OpenVZ only runs on Linux and at the present time only supports Linux guest virtual machines as well. It's not too likely we'll see it be ported to other platforms, the technology is tied quite close to Linux architecture.

Its approach is very different to that of qemu and OpenVZ is much less focused on testing new operating systems out and running multiple different environments. Instead, it goes for the more enterprise approach of running multiple instances of one thing. In actual fact, you can run different Linux distributions (provided they use exactly the same kernel version), but that's not really the aim.

OpenVZ is extremely useful in an environment such as if you are a hosting provider and you want to offer customers complete control over their operating system (root access). This type of scenario is where OpenVZ really shines.

I haven't had a chance to give OpenVZ a spin myself, but it looks extremely promising and when I do have a chance I'll have a play around. If you're interested in the technology behind it, its Wikipedia page has some quite interesting stuff.

If you've used OpenVZ, what are your experiences? How does OpenVZ compare to solutions like Xen? Feel free to comment.