It takes less time to boot Linux in Chrome on my laptop than it takes Reddit to load a discussion on my phone. That's pretty amazing. Not sure which is more amazing: How slow Reddit mobile is or how fast Linux boots in JS.
To boot Linux you formally need just the kernel image and a statically compiled busybox executable. This are only 2-3 MB.
The boot process can be optimized as well for such a tiny system. You don't need long and complex boot scripts. Just start the kernel and then start directly busybox und you are done.
Companies with this type of leadership are the ones I'm interested in giving my money to, long-term, as a consumer. Not because of any sort of principled decision based on his skills, but because I feel these types of workers would stay sharp and be quicker to solve problems correctly should they appear.
[ The motivational system is akin to the game of pinball, the analogy being that if you win this round, you get to play the game again; that is, build the next generation of computers. ]
The idea is described better in the book, though.
[ The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction[1] and a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. ]
Wise words, I hope you don't mind me pasting this on my monitor. This phrase resonated with me particularly while I'm trying to work out a particular intellectual tough spot.
In case you don't know it (it's well known in France but not sure about elsewhere) that was the motto of the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin.
The important thing is not to win, but to take part.
It uses a proxy. JSLinux emulates a network device and sends ethernet frames to a proxy via websockets. The proxy sends these frames to a Linux TAP device. The rest is a decent firewall configuration.
You might even be able to connect to another emulated JSLinux machine if you know that IP address.
> Can I access to the network from the virtual machine ?
Yes it is possible. It uses the websocket VPN offered by Benjamin Burns (see his blog). The bandwidth is capped to 40 kB/s and at most two connections are allowed per public IP address. Please don't abuse the service.
Wow, that's impressive! I tried FreeDOS and it booted very quickly. Nice to play around with DOS again - it's even got tab completion on the command line these days - fancy!
p.s. By the way archive.org were doing something very similar. You could load up a DOS box from their web site and have the old disk mags and demos running in your browser. All very cool stuff!
Interesting with the VFSync site, nice to see some standardization on this. I used to work on on-demand file systems in Emscripten, but it never worked well, especially because you can't have binary XHR outside webworkers.
But I don't understand, why is VFSync superior to something like NFS?
It seems that Bellard is trying to set up a hosting site for VFSync, so that people can easily share images. I dreamt about having something like that, combined with copy-on-write, which would make it possible to make small changes to a big filesystem and share them, without having to upload the full system. Kind of like with Docker. I wonder if that would be compatible with the VFSync model.
I couldn't get the Windows 2000 VM to connect to the internet, otherwise I wanted to try and get at least a 1-level recursive reference going... Windows 2000 running in Firefox running in Windows 2000 running in Chrome running on a Macbook Pro.
If anyone has gotten Windows 2000 to connect to the internet, would love to take a stab at it.
I tried pinging google.com from cmd and it worked, both on Firefox and Chrome. Didn't try browsing the web though. Maybe the VPN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278430) is overloaded or blocks that somehow?
Windows 2000 plays wonky with my keyboard. Any idea why?
For instance, I open Pinball and, after getting a new game with F2, pressing space (to launch the ball) does nothing except open that menu that pops up when you right click a window.
I open Notepad and I can't type words. If I press "o" it opens the "Format" menu. Which strikes me as odd.
My psychic debugging skills tell me that the Alt key has gotten stuck down in the emulated machine. Try focusing on the emulator and hitting Alt a couple of times. (This can happen e.g. if you alt-tab away from the window: the emulator sees alt-down, but the alt-up happens in another window and the key stays stuck down in the emulator.)
Possible emulation option for olde Windows applications, but installing stuff would probably be tricky, and Virtualbox would be a better option. But it depends. Chromebooks or other browser-only systems would be a target.
Doesn't this work by emulating the processor instruction set along with a few key drivers? The complexity of the OS itself wouldn't be directly hitting the emulator.
Browsers won't let javascript that's running on a webpage access random TCP ports, at the very least you'd need a server component that could act as an IP proxy for you, perhaps tunneling over websockets.
I haven't tried it, but apparently you can upload files, so it would be a matter of pushing the vim source tarball there and build it. (edit: oops, you beat me to it)
As for network, they say this:
>Can I access to the network from the virtual machine ?
> Yes it is possible. It uses the websocket VPN offered by Benjamin Burns (see his blog). The bandwidth is capped to 40 kB/s and at most two connections are allowed per public IP address. Please don't abuse the service.
But I haven't been able to get it to work...
Edit: the X11 VM has networking. Don't know how to get networking in the non-X11 VM
There's a way to get the old windows 7 games working in Windows 8/10, you can find it on the winaero forums.
Personally I just have windows 3.1 installed under dosbox, as it gives me the entire WEP and Crystal Caves. If you decide to do this, I recommend dosbox-x, or other unofficial release, as official releases are old.
