SillyDog701

[Pu7o]

Microsoft, for reasons unknown, has just made their virtualization product for windows, Virtual PC, completely free. You can download it at the Virtual PC Home Page.

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[Antony]

In April this year, Microsoft made [sdt=11180]MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition[/sdt] free.

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[Josh]

This is cool.

Does V/PC still run Linux? If so, this would interesting to try out.

I can see why MS made it free, since I assume little money is made off V/PC for Windows, for obvious reasons.

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[Don_HH2K]

This is cool.

Does V/PC still run Linux? If so, this would interesting to try out.

I can see why MS made it free, since I assume little money is made off V/PC for Windows, for obvious reasons.

I had been reading about Linux performance in Virtual PC a few days earlier on a review at Ars Technica.

As this wouldn't be a proper Ars review without a little messing around, I had to see if I could at least get Linux working. I tried both Fedora Core 2 and Red Hat 9. Fedora installed easily, but caused Virtual PC to freeze when it tried to reboot. I was eventually able to kill the process, but it took a lot of coercion. The OS would boot, but all commands resulted in segfaulting.

Red Hat 9 froze in the same fashion after installation; this time I had to reboot my computer to actually get rid of the stuck process. Afterwards, however, I had a functional Linux installation. I only tested GNOME, but presumably other configurations of X Windows also work. Unfortunately, since Linux isn't officially supported, you can't enable pointer integration or file sharing.

VMware Server is free and has support for Linux, as well as older Windows operating systems, FreeBSD, Solaris, Netware, etc...

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[beanboy89]

I've goten a chance to install Virtual PC 2004 on my Windows XP Home machine. Although the installer and program have warning dialogs that say that only Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP Pro are supported, it seems to run fine on my Windows XP Home installation.



In the comming days, I intend to test out my copy of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, which I never got to run properly on a real machine, plus I plan to download the Windows Server 2003 trial and test that out.

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[Antony]

Does V/PC still run Linux?

Just a note, Virtual PC 7 for Mac does not run Linux, not directly at least.
Virtual PC 6 can run most Linux operating systems natively.

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