VMware Player hack

I've been playing with VMware's virtual PC environment, VMware Player, lately. It's free, and you can get it here. In brevity, VMware makes software that will permit you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Their full-fledged package is rather pricey (even for students it costs more than $150). They've been gracious enough recently to release VMware Player, a freeware version that will permit you to run precompiled environments, or environments saved using the full version.

What does this mean exactly? I guess the best analogy would be a Nintendo emulator (I prefer Nesticle). Nesticle creates a virtual Nintendo in Windows, emulating the processor, the hardware, etc... You can download hundreds of the old Nintendo games as ROMs, pre-packaged little files that contain an entire game. These are then loaded into the emulator where they can be played. Now the beauty of this system is that you can save the games wherever you want, the software takes a snapshot of the processor running the game, which can be started up quickly the next time. VMware Player works the same, except it emulates an x86 processor and snags a bit of physical RAM from your computer. This means you can run Linux on your Windows desktop.

There are a variety of precompiled OSes/environments you can use. I've settled on the smallest one offered by VMware, the Browser Appliance. Turns out the Browser Appliance is actually Ubuntu Linux, and it includes the Synaptic Package Manager, so you can dynamically add additional software from the net easily (via download). There are literally thousands of packages available, and within an hour of plinking around I was able to install the KDE desktop environment (Gnome Desktop is the default), the Xfce desktop environment, the GiMP editor, and a couple different Office-type programs. (Here's a hint: the root login is "vmware" and the password is also "vmware"). It generally works for what I need it to, and although a tad slow, the command-line works the way it should, meaning I can actually use the FTP commands. I'm so used to doing this on my Mac, that using the crippled crappy commands included with the Windows command-line becomes an exercise in frustration.

Anyway, there's a hack available that will let you install whatever operating system on it that you want. That's the functionality of the full-blown VMware software, for free. This is on the to-do list for the evening. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000153064739/