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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Run Linux on your Windows desktop
Feed Title: Jared's Weblog
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Feed Description: Jared's weblog.
The web site was created after the launch of the book "Ship It!" and discusses issues from Continuous Integration to web hosting providers.
What does this mean? Think of Adobe and PDFs. They give away the PDF reader (Adobe Acrobat) but they sell the tools to create PDFs. This is the same concept. You can run a virtual machine with the VMware player but you can't create one.
But you don't have to create a virtual machine. You can just download one. :)
Check out the VMWare Virtual Machine Center. Just by registering you can get VMs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell's Suse, etc. You can get WebLogic and Websphere as well.
You can also download their Browser Appliance . It's a prebuilt Ubuntu Linux image with FireFox already installed. I'm running on my desktop at the moment and it's quite responsive.
One of the cool features that I didn't expect is how it preserves state. Initially you "boot" into your virutal machine, but when you exit it preserves the state of the memory. When you restart the virtual machine image, it brings you right back to the same spot. Did you leave the browser open? It'll still be open. Cool.
This looks like a really easy way to keep different web browsers around, different versions of an operating system, etc. I can see this being very useful for developers or testers who need another environment around... or just someone who wants to tinker a bit.
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