After I upgraded laptops about a year ago I never re-installed Linux on it as I did not want to have to partition a drive specifically for Linux. So for the past year I have not been able to play with Linux while on travel. Last week this issue came to a head when I could not answer a work related question because I did not have the OS in front of me.
So I started looking around and asking some of my buddies for a solution to the issue. Low and behold VMWare has solved the crisis. After getting VMWare loaded and playing around I have been able to install several versions of Unix. The installs were done easily and whats even more amazing is that I have a fully functional OS residing on my Windows XP-NTFS partitioned hard drive.
Now If I could just figure out how to make VMware work in my portable Firewire drive that I carry with a extra 60gigs of external HD space I would be ecstatic. So for those of you wanting to experiment with Linux or another version without dedicating a PC to it this is the answer. [VMWare]
VMWare has been out for quite a while. Although, if you don’t like it’s price tag, which most people won’t, you can choose an alternative to VMWare. I’ve been told that VirtualPC is better than VMWare, actually. If you already run Linux as the host OS and want to emulate some other OS on top of it, there is a project that’s GPL that you might want to check out. bochs.sourceforge.net, if I remember correctly. There’s also a few Linux distributions that will boot and run from removable media; Knoppix and ZipSlack, to name two. Cygwin is a Linux emulator based on Red Hat. I, personally, don’t like Cygwin, but it may have its uses for some people. Now, on to another issue: installing Linux without using emulation and/or partitioning. As far as I know, Linux can mount and read NTFS partitions, but they can’t be installed on them. FAT is different, though. A decent number of distributions can be installed and ran from a FAT partition.