From the Bochs Homepage (http://bochs.sourceforge.net) Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, Bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro or AMD64 CPU, including optional MMX, SSE, SSE2 and 3DNow instructions. Bochs is capable of running most Operating Systems inside the emulation including Linux, Windows® 95, DOS, and Windows® NT 4. Bochs was written by Kevin Lawton and is currently maintained by this project. Bochs can be compiled and used in a variety of modes, some which are still in development. The 'typical' use of bochs is to provide complete x86 PC emulation, including the x86 processor, hardware devices, and memory. This allows you to run OS's and software within the emulator on your workstation, much like you have a machine inside of a machine. For instance, let's say your workstation is a Unix/X11 workstation, but you want to run Win'95 applications. Bochs will allow you to run Win 95 and associated software on your Unix/X11 workstation, displaying a window on your workstation, simulating a monitor on a PC. From the packager I have used bochs to create a virtual windows 95 and windows 98 harddrive on my Vector Linux box. See: (http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/howto.html#DISKIMAGEHOWTO) to get started, but basically, you create a virtual harddrive and then install software to it much as you normally would a real harddrive. This means that if you want to run Windows applications you need a Windows disk and lisence. Bochs is NOT VMWare or some other such commercial offering. Below I offer some of my experiences trying to install windows on my Vector Linux 4.0 box, a 1.8 GHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM. I created a 1 GB disk drive since I really didn't need all that much space. With Windows 95 It took nearly 2 hours to install and then would only boot into 480x640 resolution with 256 colors. The start menu would take about 2 seconds to come up and raising and lowering windows took a bit longer. Many of the programs I had hoped to install would not work because they demanded larger windowing capabilities and more colors. Very sad. :-(. However, it worked for some basic windows games. Being discontent, I thought that maybe Windows 98 would be better.... With Windows 98 But...that was a mistake. Windows 98 took nearly 4 hours to install and then after all that would only boot to safe mode. Again, nothing really worthwhile got working, but I could play with simple kiddie stuff. Internet Explorer would not connect to the outside world (not necessarily a bad thing), but upon proper configuration, I could access the CDROM and floppy disk drive. And if possible, everything was even slower in Windows 98. Cool stuff I did write some basic documents on Wordpad just to test my ability to transfer things from this virtual harddisk to my real harddisk. My first thought was that I would need to write things out to floppy and then mount the floppy from Linux. But with MToolsFM, this was not necessary. MToolsFM allowed me to see my virtual Windows drive just fine and to read and write files to it. If you feel the need to use Bochs, you should also get MToolsFM. Summary Bochs is a nice toy if you have an app that is not a resource hog, but that for whatever reason won't run under Wine or CrossOver Office. It's limitations seem to be speed, some hardware access, and color/resolution. Package compiled by Tim Niiler using checkinstall