[UFO Chicago] VMWare Player and Free (Beer) Operating Systems

[Brian Sobolak]

If you like to tinker in different operating systems and don't have tons
of spare boxes around, I'd highly recommend taking the new(ish) VMWare
Player for a spin.  This weekend I ran Fedora, FreeBSD, Ubuntu and Suse to
take them for a test drive.  Have plans soon for Gentoo too.

Doug -- you might look at some of the pre-built machines as they have
Open-Xchange, a collaboration platform, and Zimbra, an ajax-y mail and
calendar that's free for a small number of users.

There's also a number of cool pre-built systems that aren't OS-specific: a
VM that runs Bugzilla, Squid, Oracle, Asterisk.

<http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/>

It's a lot easier if you just want to get a taste of an OS without the
bother of partitioning, dual-booting, etc.

They've also got a beta of VMWare Server available which lets you run
multiple servers on the same machine.  Want to run different machines for
different purposes, but only have one box to do it...run four at once!

(Which is exactly what I plan to once I buy a new machine)

brian


--
Brian Sobolak
http://www.planetshwoop.com/