There you are at home... in a moment of geekiness, you decide you want to try out an old copy of OS/2 or the latest Linux distro you just stumbled across... do you repartition and install? Or simply fire up a Virtual Machine and install there? I almost always opt for the VM. It's so easy. But.. VMware is expensive... and I am cheap... so now what?

Well, earlier this year I bumbled onto VirtualBox. http://www.virtualbox.org   It is a very nice VM application that supports almost every OS you can throw at it including Solaris, and OS/2 (if your computer hardware is up to it... it needs a special CPU mode for OS/2, and only certain CPU and motherboard combinations can provide this mode).

Right now, at home I have 3 versions of Linux and 2 versions of Windows installed into VirtualBox (running on an openSUSE10.2 host) and they work amazingly well... for example I can play avi and streaming videos full screen in XP (in the VirtualBox window) with no speed issues at all. The various Linux installs run as if they were native (for the most part). Of course Compiz-Fusion does not work, but that is to be expected since the emulated video card is not up to the task of OpenGL rendering... so that also means no fancy games in any Guest OS.

I would say it is not yet as robust as VMWare... especially for corporate use, but for home use, it is perfect. It is very simple to install and configure, and setting up a new VM is quite easy. Well worth checking out.