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Free Virtual PC software


justinstrack

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Does anybody know if there our "good" free versions of virtual PC software?

Well, VMPlayer is free, and there are ways to use it to load and install ISO's so you could kinda say it's free vmware.

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MS' Virtual PC 2004 is free and very usable, if slightly lacking in compatability over VMWare. VMWare Player is free, but requires a 3rd party too to configure VMs, VMWare Server was at one point free, not sure if it still is.

Also you can look at Bochs, QEMU or Xen which should give you enough to boot most operating systems fine. Hardware support is fairly standard across the board with well know components leading to easy driver installation.

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Anyone know anythng about Xen?

The kernel module is a nightmare, just getting opengl support is half a bottle of coke worth of work.

Its picky about what and how you install an os, thats as far as i got 'cos it wouldn't let me install from CD or network.

That was a few versions ago, but in general i found it very irritating one fix would create another bug and fixing that would just void the original fix. I gave up after two nights work with very little to show for it.

If you try it let me know how it goes.

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Nothing about Xen, but its what I'm planning to use. I've been trying openVZ though, and thats simple as anything to use.

http://www.howtoforge.com/openvz_centos4.4

Takes about an hour.

Anyone know anythng about Xen?

The kernel module is a nightmare, just getting opengl support is half a bottle of coke worth of work.

Its picky about what and how you install an os, thats as far as i got 'cos it wouldn't let me install from CD or network.

That was a few versions ago, but in general i found it very irritating one fix would create another bug and fixing that would just void the original fix. I gave up after two nights work with very little to show for it.

If you try it let me know how it goes.

So... not really viable then? Do you think it will get better or is it a pipe dream?

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i've used virtual box

it does a pretty good job. it's about as fast as vmware, perhaps a little slower, but that's just the feel i got, i didn't run any benchmarks

it only provides more simple features, lets you run another os. Vmware has cool stuff like letting you pause and instance of a vm, video capture and other cool stuff

apparently virtual box went GPL, so that's always cool

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So... not really viable then? Do you think it will get better or is it a pipe dream?

Well as far as sever side goes, theres no real need for opengl and i know some people set it up with no real problems. i just found it clunky and unnecessarily complicated (compared to the likes of MS VM). Using the SuSE yast plugin to configure it probably didn't help.

Its just a little much for fun on your desktop. Linux is the only OS officially supported (when i last checked). The idea is nice but it needs work on configurablity (is that a word) and the network and drive detection.

But i suppose it is free and open, if anything open software has more potential for improvement than closed source.

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