MS Windows emulator or VM with USB support

[Milan Knizek]

Hello,

is there an emulator or virtual machine, which would run MS Windows on FreeBSD
as a host system and support USB devices? (I do not mean USB Mass Storage,
but e.g. Garmin GPS device with Garmin's MapSource.)

Preferrably some free software.

AFAIK wine cannot support usb devices, VMware Server 1.x does runs only on
linux.

Best regards,
Milan

--
Milan Knížek
http://milan-knizek.net/
e-mail knizek {na} volny {v} cz
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[yous...@u.washington.edu]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Milan Knizek wrote:

> Hello,
>
> is there an emulator or virtual machine, which would run MS Windows on FreeBSD
> as a host system and support USB devices? (I do not mean USB Mass Storage,
> but e.g. Garmin GPS device with Garmin's MapSource.)
>
> Preferrably some free software.
>
> AFAIK wine cannot support usb devices, VMware Server 1.x does runs only on
> linux.
>
> Best regards,
> Milan
>
> --
> Milan Knížek
> http://milan-knizek.net/
> e-mail knizek {na} volny {v} cz

Based on my experience VMware is the most complete VM that can deliver this. However, there are people working on porting Xen to FreeBSD (CURRENT I believe, not STABLE).

So stay tuned for Xen if you're interested..

-Garrett

[Adam J Richardson]

yous...@u.washington.edu wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Milan Knizek wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> is there an emulator or virtual machine, which would run MS Windows on
>> FreeBSD
>> as a host system and support USB devices? (I do not mean USB Mass
>> Storage,
>> but e.g. Garmin GPS device with Garmin's MapSource.)
>>
>> Preferrably some free software.
>>
>> AFAIK wine cannot support usb devices, VMware Server 1.x does runs
>> only on
>> linux.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Milan
>>
>> --
>> Milan Knížek
>> http://milan-knizek.net/
>> e-mail knizek {na} volny {v} cz
>
> Based on my experience VMware is the most complete VM that can deliver
> this. However, there are people working on porting Xen to FreeBSD
> (CURRENT I believe, not STABLE).
>
> So stay tuned for Xen if you're interested..
>
> -Garrett
>

Does Qemu do what you want? I'm installing Windows 2000 Professional
inside Qemu for some experiments. I don't know if it fulfils your USB
requirement, but it's free and I hear it runs on FreeBSD pretty well.

Hope this helps,
Adam J Richardson

[Garrett Cooper]

I've had a few rounds with Qemu on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac, and Windows,
and each time when I try and get stuff setup, it breaks unfortunately
(all of the above except Mac) or is too slow to be usable (Mac, because
of my iBook's processor speed >_>).

Xen isn't half bad though because it's cross architecture, similar to
Qemu, but with more native emulating speeds. Unfortunately VMWare is
only available for x86 CPUs and friends though, and although someone
offered a bounty for proper Linux emulation of it on FreeBSD, it's
probably going to be a while before it's available (at least until the
linuxalator (sp?) gets fixed a bit more..).

Those are my 2 cents :).
-Garrett

[Milan Knizek]

On Saturday 21 of April 2007, Adam J Richardson wrote:
> yous...@u.washington.edu wrote:
> > On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Milan Knizek wrote:
> >> is there an emulator or virtual machine, which would run MS Windows on
> >> FreeBSD
> >> as a host system and support USB devices? (I do not mean USB Mass
> >> Storage,
> >> but e.g. Garmin GPS device with Garmin's MapSource.)
> >>

> Does Qemu do what you want? I'm installing Windows 2000 Professional
> inside Qemu for some experiments. I don't know if it fulfils your USB
> requirement, but it's free and I hear it runs on FreeBSD pretty well.

I have tried Qemu half year ago on linux and it almost got frozen when I
switched Garmin on (the drivers were installed before).

May be I give it a try on FreeBSD.

--
Milan Knížek
http://milan-knizek.net/
e-mail knizek {na} volny {v} cz