This weekend I ran across a new product from VMWare. The VMWare player for Linux or Windows allows you to run a guest operating system on your machine for free. So for example, you can run a complete Ubuntu Linux install inside of Windows. VMWare uses virtualization techniques to do this, not emulation. This means the virtual machines perform quite well if you have enough memory.

Previously, you could only use the VMWare Workstation product to do this (which costs about $199). Of course, there are some limitations. You can't create a virtual machine from scratch, and you can't setup things like a private network on the machine (your IP address is shared, the workstation has a few other options). To use the player, you can download a number of prebuilt Linux operating systems that work great. I played around with the Ubuntu OS and had quite a bit of fun with it.

This looks like a great idea to me. By offering the free product, a lot more people will get a chance to use the software. Once they check it out, I imagine a lot of people will buy Workstation so they can create their own virtual machines. I can think of a number of uses for testing or training with the software.

Download the player and check it out. Its a great way play around with Linux with little or no fuss.