Some Questions About Linux And SpeakUp, part 2

[Gregory Nowak]

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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


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