VMWare is some pretty awesome software. Basically, it allows you to create virtual machines that run your OS of choice inside another OS. For instance, on a Windows XP machine I run a VMWare virtual instance of K/Ubuntu, allowing me to basically have two operating systems running at the same time on the same machine. Very cool, eh? Now VMWare has released for free the VMware Player, which allows you to run OS images that others have created. Want to try out Linux on your (fairly powerful) Windows machine? Download the free VMWare Player, then download a pre-created image of Linux. Bam! You've got a huge choice of community OS images, including Debian, Fedora Core, FreeBSD, SUSE, K/Ubuntu, and even Minix! Guys, this one is an excellent opportunity, so definitely check this one out. Just be aware that you need a fairly decent host machine. I've got an AMD 64 3800 with 1.5 GB of RAM running Windows XP, and VMWare runs just peachy (it better!). The slower the machine, the smaller the RAM, the worse VMWare will ...

Today is SUSE day on the Open Source Weblog, and to finish it all up I'm pointing you some ISOs so you can try the latest 'n greatest out yourself. SUSE 9.3 is out, and it's getting good reviews. There's a lot of cool stuff in 9.3, including Firefox 1.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0 (it's still beta, so expect some roughness), GIMP 2.2, Beagle (the search tool I've discussed before), Xen (kinda like built-in open source VMWare), and a VoIP client. Now you can download a Live DVD of SUSE 9.3 - here's a direct link, but remember, this is a 1.5 GB file! What you really oughta do is view the mirrors page and pick something close to you. And if you wanna know more, view the README first (one ultra-cool thing: it's available for i386 AND AMD64!) (Check out all my postings on SUSE, Firefox, GIMP, Beagle, OpenOffice.org, Xen.) ...

Just today I was installing 9.2 on one of my machines, thinking, "my goodness, for an RPM-based distro, SUSE sure is nice", and thinking to myself that 9.3 should be out soon & will be probably be pretty darn good. Well imagine my surprise to find out that Novell has published a SUSE LINUX 9.3 Professional Review that gives an overview of new stuff in 9.3, and includes screenshots. If you're interested in finding out what's comin' 'round the mountain real soon now, then check this one out. It looks really nice: KDE 3.4, GNOME 2.10, Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Evolution 2.1.5, Xen, auto recognition of Bluetooth, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Beagle (which means really awesome machine-wide searching), GIMP 2.2.3, & 2.6.11 kernel. You can already pre-order it! ...