VMWare Player, Ubuntu and Mac OSX

So you want to play some other operating systems for some new features, or test your applications on other OSs? Take a try on VMWare Player. It is free.

Along with downloading and installing VMWare, you should also download OS images ( also called as Virtual Applicances). I think you should not miss Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop image (512M). I found that Ubuntu 8.04 running quite smoothly inside VMWare on my laptop with duo-core 2.2Ghz CPU and 2G memory. And I am lazy to install GIMP on my Vista, so running GIMP for some graphic manipulations may be one of Ubuntu jobs. And developing C++ or Java applications inside Ubuntu may be another job for me. And lots of other testing jobs. So owning an Ubuntu desktop is necessary.

(But I find a big inconvenience in my Ubuntu. I can input anything but having great difficulties in inputting 5 characters: “, ‘, ~, `, ^. I need to press that key and follow a space key to input these characters. I struggled hours to fix it but failed. So if you need a solution, please be kind to inform me.)

By the way, why not taking a try on Mac OSX Leopard. Download its 3.3G (expanded to 8G) Mac OSX Leopard x86 image (You should know that it is a pirate copy), following its instructions to install and patch. As using VMWare Player, you have to modify *.vmx directly to load *.iso patch into Leopard:

ide1:0.fileName = “D:\Downloads\Maxxuss-AMDPCNET-v1.0_1043.iso”
ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”

And you may also change

guestOS = “freebsd-64”

to

guestOS = “freebsd”

So no 64-bit CPU warning in starting this x86 Mac copy.

Well, I feel little excitement to Leopard as it is too slow. So maybe it is just for feature peeking or some small tests. It is not ready for daily work. Hope you have enough patience for the 2-3 days’ image download time and 12G hard disk spaces wasting.