On 8/3/2010 8:10 AM, Scott Robbins wrote:
VMware on the best machine you have and run the OS in question as a guest. In many cases you can find an image already installed that you can just download and run under VMware player. If you have to build your own, you'll probably want the latest version of vmware server 1.x that you can find (the 2.x versions have a problem running under Red Hat or Centos and nobody likes the web based console).
Aha---have you tried the latest VMwareplayer? It seems to be their replacement for the old VMwareserver. It now enables you to install an O/S, so these days, I'm recommending it over VMware server--like you (and most people), I greatly dislike the 2.x way of doing things.
There is also the lighter, and at this point, probably less feature-ful VirtualBox, of course. However, VMwareplayer, like the old VMware server (that is, 1.x) allows you to install a wide variety of systems.
I do have a fairly recent player on an XP laptop but hadn't explored the new features since I usually start by copying an image created on a faster machine under vmware server. But the main reason for having a recent version installed is that it handles USB drives nicely, giving you a choice of whether they attach to the host or guest and at the time I couldn't get that to work at all with VirtualBox even though the docs said it should. I find it very handy to be able to connect linux-formatted drives through a usb cable adapter that handles ide/laptop/sata drives and access the content without having to boot into linux - with the potential to do disaster recovery restores from a backuppc disk image.