-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Here is the second part of my post. The good news there is that you can configure the entire program, and all virtual machines using a command-line program, and I don't mind using that, once I've read the manual, and learned how it works. The second down side to virtualbox is that it doesn't as of now support accessing physical serial ports on the host from the guest. Serial ports in the guest are supported as of the latest version, but only to named pipes on windows, or domain sockets in the gnu/linux versions. When I asked on their mailing list if they plan to add physical serial port access, they said they aren't planning to do so as of now, but they did point out that contributions are welcomed to the open source version, and that it wouldn't be too hard to write a backend modeled on the named pipe/domain socket approach, to talk to a serial port on the host. They do state in their documentation that well-written code contributed to the open source version can be accepted into the commercial version. Also, they did say in their documentation that features currently existing in the commercial version only (usb support, and vrdp), will eventually find their way into the open source version as well. I do plan to have a look at their serial code one of these days, and see if I understand enough of it to add physical port support. It shouldn't be that difficult I'm thinking, all you'd really need to do is intercept the serial port parameters the guest sets the virtual port to, set the same parameters on the chosen physical port, and then just shuttle data back and forth between the virtual port, and the physical port. I suppose this post wouldn't be complete without mentioning qemu: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ , which is another virtual machine emulator, that is entirely open source. It's beta software, primarily aimed at gnu/linux hosts, though there is an alpha port of it to windows as well, that I believe even runs on win9x/me as well. It does of course run under windows xp also. I've had poor results trying the windows port, but Zach seems to be having great success with it, judging from his posts on the subject to this list. Well, that's probably much more then what you were looking for, but it gives you a fairly good run-down on what's available out there in terms of virtual machine emulators. I'd recommend virtualbox myself, but I must also admit I've developed a bias for it in the 2 weeks or so, since I started playing with it. Greg - -- web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) - -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGkWJp7s9z/XlyUyARAka3AJ4pWr1PkmSwk/VvaZNNW5zYHKprnQCeL4W3 VMw7kDEHoRvShOkO2/Ts5s8= =RAB1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
