Yes! Bochs is released under the GNU LGPL, much thanks to MandrakeSoft, makers of the Linux-Mandrake distribution.
Phonetically the same as the English word "box". It's just a play on the word "box", since techies like to call their machines a "Linux box", "Windows box", ... Bochs emulates a box inside a box.
Kevin Lawton is the primary author of bochs. There have been bug fixes, enhancements, and code contributions from some few hundred people, so it is not possible to list them all. Kevin is presently working on a PC virtualization project called plex86 and no longer maintain bochs.
With Kevin's help, in April 2001, the members of the bochs-developers mailing list set up a new official bochs site hosted by Source Forge. The current admins on this project are Bryce Denney, Greg Alexander, and Don Becker.
Because Bochs emulates every x86 instruction and all the devices in a PC system, it does not reach high emulation speeds. Kevin reported approximately 1.5MIPS using bochs on a 400Mhz PII Linux machine. Users who have an x86 processor and want the highest emulation speeds may want to consider PC virtualization sotware uch as plex86 (free) or vmware (commercial).
No. You use a disk image file, which is simply a large file, like any other file, on your platform's disk.
Think about this. If you had two different PC's, they would require different hardware drivers. So you may not be able to safely move a disk drive with Win95 on it, from one to the other. Bochs is no different. It emulates a certain set of hardware devices, and requires each OS be configured for those devices.
Yes. For instructions on joining, refer to Chapter 7>
Yes! Look for "screen shots" on the Bochs home page or on other Bochs sites.
Yes, a CDROM is supported in Linux, Windows, and OpenBSD. The CDROM drivers for bochs allow the guest operating system to access the host operating system's CDROM data directly.
Yes, there is Sound Blaster emulation support for Windows and Linux.
Supposedly yes. There is emulation for an NE2000 NIC in the current releases, though I have not heard whether it works or not. If you try it, please fill out a testing form or bug report.
Well, lot's of different OS's run inside of bochs, so thousands. I'm assuming your asking about Windows programs. To give you a few, the following ones from the Winstone'98 tests worked:
Access 97
CorelDRAW! 7
Excel 97
Lotus 1-2-3 97
Word 97
PowerPoint 97
Quattro Pro 7
WordPerfect 7
Also, I've compiled an entire OS kernel inside bochs before. Not to mention, running DOOM, though at then-pathetic speeds.