VMPlayer and qemu on Linux

[markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org]

I'm not sure how many know about or use VMPlayer. VMPlayer is a fee
download from vmware. It runs virtual machines within a host OS such as
Linux or Windows.

The qemu project has a similar aim and works fairly well, but vmplayer
seems a bit more polished and certainly more popular.

Why would you want vmplayer or qemu? Have you ever had the problem where
you needed to run a specific program that only ran on an OS you didn't
have? Virtualization is all the rage. It allows you to create full virtual
environments. You can run Windows XP on Linux in a virtual machine. You
can install Windows XP into a virtual machine hosted on Linux.

You can run a full 32bit version of Linux on a 64bit version of Linux. You
can run Windows Server 2003 in a virtual machine on Windows or Linux.

Given this, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where you can write a
program on Linux, and distribute it as a virtual machine for Windows,
Linux, or what ever. No version problems, no OS issues, nothing! Think
about it. All the promise of Java and potentially faster than java, and
your choice of development environments! Fully native or emulated on a
host.

Not only that, it is free. You can use VMPlayer to run your programs, and
you can use the qemu tools to create the virtual machines.

We have just returned to the early days of computers where virtual
machines were really self contained worlds.

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