VMWare Player
Ok, I have been told that I am really late to the game on this whole VMWare Player thing. It was apparently released in the fall. But for anyone is more or at least behind the times as I am, maybe this will be some useful info.
So, the VMWare Player … it’s a free virtual machine. What does that mean? Well, it basically lets you run a virtual computer inside your current computer. Here, check out a screenshot. See, there I am running Slackware Linux 10.2 inside a virtual machine that is running on top of Windows XP Pro (if you look closely, you’ll see that I am composing this blog entry in that virtual machine).
So how does it work? Well, VMWare Player makes your computer’s hardware available to the virtual machine. Two special cases though are memory and hard drive. For the virtual hard drive, you have a single image file on your real hard drive. Think of it like a zip file with all of the files for the virtual machine in it (it’s really more complicate than that, but work with me here). For memory, you do actually devote a certain amount of your physical memory (RAM) to the virtual machine. In my case, I have 1GB of physical memory and I devoted 256MB to my virtual machine.
The neat thing is, the virtual machine is completely separate from your real computer. That’s how you can run a completely different operating system on it. If your virtual machine crashes, your real computer is fine. If your virtual machine gets a virus, your real computer is fine. You can do crazy stuff with your virtual machine without fear of damaging your real computer. Or you can use it to run another operating system (like me).
Anyhow, it’s really a great way to play with Linux, or to have a Linux development environment even though you primarily run Windows. There is a page with a few different preloaded versions of Linux to mess around with. I recommend the Browser Appliance, which runs on Ubuntu Linux.
cw