VMware Player
This is kewl — VMware Player is a free program for running not only VMware's own Virtual Machines, but also Microsoft's Virtual PC's. This is handy for myself as I've found that MS's Virtual PC's frequently jams when I shutdown the virtual PC and I have reboot the host PC because I can't even kill the process. And now I can run the already created virtual PC in VMware player.
VMware Player is useless if you don't have an already created virtual PC from any of the commercial versions of VMware or Microsoft's Virtual PC. Fortunately VMware has a few machine platforms and platforms with preinstalled applications you can download for free.
I grabbed the Browser-Appliance machine which was a 200MB download. I think it's running Ubuntu Linux and displays Mozilla Firefox on start-up for your spyware free browsing. Nice.
My experiance with running a MS Virtual PC was less smooth as I was unable to open the vmc file. It seems this is a popular problem. I was able to fix it by deleting a .vsv file. I think the .vsv file was a result of the virtual PC crash I had experianced. Otherwise the machine ran as smoothly as it runs under MS's Virtual PC software.
Unfortunately VMware Player doesn't include the ability to install VMware Tools so if your running a MS Virtual PC you need to press Ctrl+Alt to free your mouse from the virtual PC. Another thing is that the player creates about 16 new files when running a MS Virtual PC. It would be a good idea to put your virtual pc's in their own folders.
I'm curious if VMware Player will introduce pirate virtual machines onto P2P networks. I'm unable to test, but I would assume you could set up a virtual machine without an OS installed and use VMware Player to install an OS later. Not only could you make unlimited copies of this machine, but their file size would be very small making them easily distributed until an OS had been installed. I believe a Mac OSX virtual machine is already floating around on P2P networks.
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1. Sid says…
even better
http://www.easyvmx.com/
Posted on Tue 23 Oct, 2007