I don't know if this has been posted or not, but I saw it on Slashdot and though it was pretty cool..

This Fabrice Bellard fellow has written an x86 emulator in JavaScript that boots Linux in your browser (requires FF 4 or chrome it seems).
http://bellard.org/jslinux/

It seems he also has some other pretty amazing acomplishments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

http://www.urbanlegends.com ...

Did you look at it at all? You can write some basic code in vi and compile it using his C compiler 'tcc'.

Been out a long time. http://jpc.sourceforge.net/home_home.html

Java != JavaScript. They're not even closely related.

1 members found this post helpful.

Run linux in your browser was the topic.

JPC is more advanced and really useful right now.

I think the world of qemu and bellards work on it but this is really useless at this point.
http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html

If you haven't heard, Fabrice Bellard (the developer of QEMU) created JS/Linux, a Javascript PC Emulator.

He then compiled a 2.6.20 Linux kernel and put together a mini distro that's up and running and you can actually play with root access in a shell right here! (Though you must have a very modern browser.)

There's an article in The-H about it.

Is this cool or what?

No wait! That was rhetorical, it's not the question. This little demo isn't practical since there is no network connectivity, and I couldn't see anyway to access a real file system. So there would clearly need to be some more development. But here's the real question:

Is there any practical use for this?

I hope so, but I can't think of anything.

well, at te very least this is proof that javascript is a very useful tool

seriously though, this might be a beginning of a new level of application sandboxing within browsers

I don't know of any practical use for it (at this time), but it's definitely cool!

Uses? Talk about a secure sandbox for testing!
It may also be an interesting place for a newby to study command-line use and shell scripting. I can see expanding upon the concept to create useful cases. Things I now use virtual machines for might transfer to such an environment.

Mostly it is just a REALLY NEAT TOY! One I would not have thought to create myself, and one that has earned my respect for the author.

Not useful yet or maybe never.

Look at JPC for something that is useful (java not script) right now.

At first I thought this was almost spam, jefro. But it's far from it.

It turns out that JPC is a legitimate x86 PC emulator that runs in Java, just like you said.
And it runs DSL. And you can run a demo right on the JPC site.
Impressive.

Both of these are fascinating and surprising, though I still can't think of any real use for them beyond the fun they provide in messing with them, or maybe some kind of demo.

In a very real sense things like virtual machine software was at one time this basic.

Moved to Linux-Virtualisation