The VMware Player tutorials over at x86Virtualization.com have been a great hit, and part 3 has just surfaced.

This time you will learn how to make your own virtual machines, using either EasyVMX! or VMX Builder.

I'm sure you know about EasyVMX!, since you're already here reading this story. VMX Builder is another very nice piece of software that will make virtual machines. It's a Windows program, so you will need Windows (or maybe Wine) to run it. Or, if you're up for it, create a virtual machine to run it!

The article at x86Virtualization will take you on a trip down memory lane.
They're installing MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Netscape!

You may want to Digg it!

Last year NTFS write support was so bad that you'd better not use it. At least not if you wanted to access the disk again sometime later.

Then, all of the sudden, somebody just gave us usable NTFS support in Linux. And when the Internet gave us macfuse, we were able to access that XP BootCamp partiton.

Oh, joy of joys!

Just about half a year after its first release, NTFS-3G has reached version 1.0.

This is a great step forward for people who are using more than one operating system!

Microsoft is hungry for a piece of the virtualization pie, as this article will show you.

Windows Longhorn Server will have virtualization, in the form of a hypervisor.
When will Longhorn be released you ask? The answer is sooner or later. Or on time. Impossible to tell yet.

From the article:
"The big delay is virtualization. Virtualization is the hot technology. We've been very clear that virtualization belongs in the operating system and when you take a hypervisor approach we believe it has certain advantages."

Microsoft calls it the big delay, but they also say that Longhorn may be released earlier than planned. If it could be an advantage against VMware...

How about Xen in this mix?
Microsoft and XenSouce have signed a deal last july, to ensure interoperability between the two products.

The Sapling Program is taking a stab at Wine, promising to convert Windows games to Linux and Mac OS X.

This is a request for funding, and they will give you access to the first alpha build of Alky. It will convert the Prey Demo to run natively on OSX and/or Linux. They are currently working on converting World of Warcraft to Linux and Oblivion to Linux and Mac OSX.

My vapourware radar is ever so slightly engaged, but I hope they can come through with this.

Inching closer and closer to release, Parallels is presenting Release Candidate 3.

So what's new?
RC3 offers seamless upgrade from XP to Vista. And you have better file sharing, with improved security.

There is a whole lot more info here. A very interesting piece of information is that Parallels is ready to run on Apple's next operating system, Leopard.

As always when Parallels is gearing up for a release, the performance is improved in various ways.

There's some hard work going on at the Wine HQ.
Now, Wine 0.9.31 is released!

Here's the short list of changes:

  - Many Direct3D fixes and performance improvements.
  - Several new comctl32 test cases.
  - IDL compiler improvements.
  - More OLE32 marshalling fixes.
  - Lots of bug fixes.

Seems to me that the main focus these days is Direct3D, which has the possibility to make Wine the best choice for people who want to run their games on something else than Windows.

x86Virtualization.com continues the VMware Player tutorials.

This time, the focus is on prebuilt images. How to get them, how to run them and what to do with them.

As VMware has a whole lot of virtual appliances, there should be little trouble finding something cool, new and shiny to play with.

In the article, you will find tests of FreeNAS, Haiku (a BeOS clone) and RedHat images.

With two parts down, that leaves us waiting for part 3 and 4: Creating your own VMware images and converting from physical to virtual.

The Norwegian IT sector's own news site on the net Digi.no has a column called Nerdvana, or the "Net Jewel".

EasyVMX! was listed in the System Tools section there, and even got a place on the front page.

Oh the fame!
Soon people will recognize me on the street. Better watch out for Paparazzis now...

With the advent of CPU hardware support for virtualization, like Intel's VT-x, we were promised that Windows would be running unmodified in Xen.

Today Novell and Intel announced that you can virtualize unmodified Windows on Xen.

From the announcement:

"Novell and Intel Corporation today announced the availability of paravirtualized network and block device drivers that will allow Microsoft Windows Server 2000/2003/XP to run unmodified in Xen virtual environments on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell, operating on Intel-based server platforms featuring Intel Virtualization Technology. Combined with the existing ability to host unmodified Linux on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, these new drivers will let customers confidently migrate to newer and fewer energy-efficient servers, consolidating legacy Windows or Linux solutions onto virtual servers."

Go here for more virtualization info from Novell, and here for Intel's page on virtualization.

In a series of four articles, x86Virtualization.com will be focusing on VMware Player.

The first article shows you how to install VMware Player, step by step.

With the player installed, they will continue to these topics: