Virtual PC

what do you mean by >older windows versions< ? i ran W2K3 Server, XP and all other more modern MS OS's - should work fine for you, too.

http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.pcbsd.org/

Quote:

Original post by ChemicalImbalance OK, I got ahold of MS Virtual PC and Im having a blast. Any suggestions on free operating systems that I can install? So far Ive mostly been keeping it to Linux flavors and old versions of Windows, but Id be interested in other OSes.

what are you talking about?

BeOS?

Quote:

Original post by nOObie dev Quote: Original post by ChemicalImbalance OK, I got ahold of MS Virtual PC and Im having a blast. Any suggestions on free operating systems that I can install? So far Ive mostly been keeping it to Linux flavors and old versions of Windows, but Id be interested in other OSes. what are you talking about?

I believe Virtual PC is the thing that allows computers to bootup in multiple OSes, even if they are wildly different in nature. I.E. you can have Linux and Windows on the same pc, whereas before there would be conflicts. Or, as I think it was intended for, Windows on a Macintosh alongside Mac OSX.

At first I thought he was talking about a virtual computer, for security reasons, but I guess not.

Microsoft Virtual PC is a virtualization software that basically makes a "virtual pc" that you can install a "guest" operating system inside of the "host" operating system.

Virtual PC, and similar software, create virtual hardware devices that the "guest" operating systems access, all of which access the same underlying "host" hardware. Basically, you are running two (or more) operating systems at once on the same set of physical hardware, (I have run XP as the host and Windows 98, Fedora Core 5, and FreeBSD as guests all at the same time for testing, though I wouldn't recommend it.)

It's good for testing (espically things like .NET vs Mono), and great for partitioning off a server, you could run multiple guest FreeBSD machines that appear to the outside network as totally separate machines that can be accessed, rebooted, and operated completely independatly. For shared hosting, you can basically stack 4 or 5 "guest" machines on one physical set of hardware, and clients can access the "guest" with absolutely no way to effect the other "guests" (unlike traditional shared hosting). Plus it makes moving servers (because they are all virtual and the VM replicates the same set of virtual hardware) they can be moved from physical machine to physical machine with little to no reconfiguration.

As far as MS Virtual PC goes, in my useage it works great for Microsoft operating systems, but sometimes is a little tricky with non MS operating systems. I personally prefer VMWare. (VMWare player and VMWare server are also free, like VirtualPC). Just had better luck and stablity with VMWare with a wider variety of operating systems.

One of these days, I really want to set up a Xen setup to see how that goes, just haven't had a spare box to try it on yet.

As far as OSes to try, you could try something like Plan 9.

Or just start going through the big list.