2Mark Szkolnicki:
> Regarding physical media support - I have not ran into any difficulties at all at this testing phase - all files and installations proceeded without any errors, and I can only report that all physical optical media has booted correctly and flawlessly, as of now, for the optical drives tested.
Yes, reading the attached media from within the VM is good, once booted. But if you try to boot from a physical floppy, or physical CD, you can encounter some problems (possibly, VM will crash).
> The VirtualBox package I downloaded was vbox-os2-i386-v5.0.51.zip dated 22/3/2018 following the link Martin created. Might there be another package floating about or that you are using? Or perhaps a global setting that enables or disables this feature, causing what I have observed?
No newer version was released. so far. I'm not aware of any global version, which disables it for all VM's. Just disable it for every VM created for now. Possibly, I'll try to disable it globally if required features are missing on your kernel, in the future.
Regarding your P.S. question - The VBox topic has generated a lot of interest, based on the number of views.
I started the new thread as one of the big problems we always have in the OS/2 / eCS / ArcaOS community is getting people to test new items or contribute to the conversation. The focus should not only be on the problems which developers and the highly technical or experienced users discuss, but also how to use and test the software properly, to allow other useful or important feedback to be obtained.. Perhaps, with a little encouragement, especially with a lot of the new users coming on-board with the release of ArcaOS, We can get a lot more testing done, which would certainly help you and others advance development of what I personally consider an important piece of software that could help my business, as VirtualPC definitely needs a more robust and flexible follow-on for our community.
"Problems" in the title always get people to shy away from testing or even asking questions, thinking their questions may be dumb, untechnical or not pertinent. We will also seriously need some documentation for VirtualBox, as the solutions we are coming up with need to be captured to allow people to consistently install and use it successfully, especially if you or others coming up with new drops in future.
Hm, I don't think the word "Problems" will get people shy away from the thread. But indeed "Testing" is better name than "Problems", I agree.
PS: BTW, in the end of older thread I added some CONFIG.SYS options to try for you. You said that you had to close Seamonkey, to run VBox successfully. I'd suspect that if you try these options, you will be able to run both at the same time (if you'll make everything correctly)
Hi Valery!
I'm not sure how many in the community are using OS/4 consistently or not at the moment.
A big number, in fact.
I myself do not use it, and I suspect the majority of users here are using a version of the IBM kernel, especially with the ArcaOS release, so you may find many testing reports varying significantly from what you may see on OS/4.
I actually would like to test it (OS/4) at some point, but I suspect if something varies significantly from what you have experienced, testing on OS/4, the difference between kernels and structures is probably the culprit. (including the slowdowns I mentioned previously with AMD-V enabled on the IBM kernel or physical media being unstable).
That why wide testing could be very important, as this VirtualBox development continues.
Indeed, not so big difference. OS/4 kernels contain some enhancements. For example, consistent hi-res timer support, based on HPET timer; Special KEE's for consistently getting curent CPU number (no -1018 error), support for CPU rendez-vous (which allows to use HW virtualization, etc., etc.)
As I said in my previous post I think we in the community need some formalized "prototype" and "final" documentation to distribute out with the OS/2 VirtualBox even if it comes in two flavours - OS/2 / eCS / ArcaOS and another for OS/4, as YMMV.
I don't think that we need two separate documentation files. Only some special notes. I think, README.OS2 file is sufficient. It did not updated since version 5.0.6. It should be enhanced more, of course, and contain OS/2-specific notes. Otherwise, documentation from Sun/Oracle applies.
