VMWare Player: Today's Free File

Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Linux, Commercial

VMWare Player: Today's Free File

by Marc Perton Oct 21st 2005

Want to run Linux on a Windows machine without having to partition your drive or reboot? Want to install a second copy of Windows to use as your testing platform? Or how about installing a dedicated browsing environment where you can surf the net without worrying about infecting your computer with spyware? The new VMWare Player, a free app from VMWare will let you do all of those things. The program can run any pre-built virtual machine, and the company offers several virtual machines for free, including versions with Linux and VMWare's Browser Appliance — a packaged distro of Ubuntu, Gnome and Firefox. (To run Windows in a virtual machine, you'll need someone with a full copy of VMWare or Virtual PC, along with a licensed copy of Windows, to create a virtual machine for you.) Note: don't try this at home if you don't have a broadband connection — and a big chunk of free space on your hard drive. Some of the virtual machines on offer are as large as 2GB.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Fabulo said 3:29PM on 10-22-2005

Or you can use QEMU http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ which is free, opensource and will let you install whatever virtual machine you wish. It's incredibly easy to install and configure.
See here for a simple how to involving Linux and a thumbdrive (disclaimer: shameless plug for my own article)
http://soylink.blogspot.com/2005/09/portable-linux-on-my-thumbdrive.html

Zelidar said 7:36AM on 10-24-2005

Thanks Fabulo, really nice howto! To have Quemu and Linux run in my config I had to change the command line a bit, "c.img" into "linux.img".

I also gave the DSL release candidate a try (dsl-2.0RC1.iso) and it ran smooth from my USB stick. Everything included staying below 60.2MB. Impressive!

dcgrendel said 9:10PM on 10-24-2005

I wrote a VMWare .VMX file generator in dhtml to use with this. Try it out (click my name at the bottom).

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