VirtualBox

Well this sure seems pretty awesome. I haven't spent much time fiddling with operating system installs lately since I installed Win7 64-bit about a year ago and life has been smooth and easy-going ever since - quite seriously, this OS is pretty awesome. On my old Dell Laptop I used to have a dual-boot setup with Ubuntu Linux and Win XP SP3. It was nice to have a Linux option once in a while if you really needed it but it was always a pain to have to reboot the machine into Linux if you wanted to use it - the result was it didn't get much use.

Enter, VirtualBox. So I've heard a bazillion things about VMWare and Virtualized machines in general over the years and it always sounded cool but I figured my sound card wouldn't work, or my internet would be terrible at best, or some other host of issues would come up that would make the process not worthwhile. As it turns out, VirtualBox is INCREDIBLY easy to use, and did I mention... FREE?!?! Apparently it's an Open Source effort between Sun and Oracle, and I'm pretty darn impressed already.

Another issue I've heard is that Virtualization can be suuuuuper slow. We'll see how my machine copes, but I do have a 64-bit Quad Core with 4 Gb RAM. Really kicking myself now that I didn't buy 8 Gb RAM at purchase time, but hopefully this'll be good enough. This is going to be pretty fun to set up and the cool thing is, if it doesn't work or you decide you no longer want a given operating system, you just delete the virtual disk and uninstall VirtualBox. Pretty amazing. Another cool thing is that the disks are expanding - so if you end up needing a larger "virtual partition" for your given operating system, then it will expand the virtual disk (just a biiiiig file) as needed. Fancy!

More info: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads