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I've never had an excuse to use VMWare... What benefits does it offer over emulators like qemu and bochs? How about versus everybody's favorite VM/emulator buzzword, Xen?

Its more polished, simpler to configure, and a good deal faster than qemu or bochs. As for Xen, thats a bit of a different animal. Xen has its own niche, at least in the OSS world.

In short it is mature, fast and reliable.

Also on the left there is a search tool, type 'vmware'.

From doing that, I came up with http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7899

Which is an article about the two leading virtualisation software products.

BTW, I like VPC too.

Thanks for mentioning qemu that looks interesting.
But really you can't compare VMWARE with Bochs.
Bochs is a full emulator--it's relatively SLOW, vmware is more a virtualizer. It's more akin to qemu's accelator(it appears) or plex86. And Xen is better than VMWare in speed, but requires that your OS be written to run on the XEN Virtual Machine, IIRC.

"And Xen is better than VMWare in speed, but requires that your OS be written to run on the XEN Virtual Machine, IIRC."

It actually requires the HOST operating system to be modified to work. That's why its not available for Windows yet.

Xen requires support from the host kernel. So does VMWare. Some of the stuff they do simply can not be done from user-space applications. That's not the reason that Xen can't run on Windows as a host OS.

Xen does require than the GUEST operating system be modified to run under Xen. The technique it uses is called paravirtualization, and allows Xen to run much faster than VMWare (especially in I/O performance). That's why Xen can only run open source OSes at the moment.

When processors with hardware virtualization support become available from AMD and Intel, that restriction will be lifted.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. One could even create a generic machine with an empty HD image using the evaluation version, store that away, and then make copies and install any system from CDs under the free player. Unless the player is crippled so you can't access CDs, that is.

I was able to run Knoppix in it. I just don't think you can resize partitions.

Right, the way I know VMWare you can't change the size of a disk image, but since the image "grows" you can make it as many gigs you like and it still won't be that big until it gets filled with actual data. Because the image represents a disk, I believe you can have partitions on it and change their sizes as you wish, I'm not sure how partitions would affect the growing feature though.

Those aren't the operating systems I had in mind, but thanks anyway.

I'm waiting until I can run something like ReactOS in VMWare, it beats Qemu which doesn't seem to run it very fast. Interestingly enough I can run Windows 98 in Qemu with reasonable speed, but not ReactOS which I expect is lighter.

Works fine here too.
do you have javascript turned off?
but, I do hate sites that pointlessly use javascript for navigation. Hyperlinks were created for a reason.

Is impossible to read in Firefox, linux. I had to use Opera.

Works fine in Firefox 1.07 on Mandriva 2006.

Debian Sid here. Normally Firefox renders all Web Pages fine.

As far as I can tell, the Browser Appliance isn't limited like that. It's pretty stripped down, but Apt is there (and Synaptic as well) and the sources are fine. It's Hoary-based, not Breezy.

The user account password (needed for sudo) is "vmware"--a lucky guess on my part, couldn't find it documented.

Nothing. I've installed several Linux distro's into the virtual disk images by modifying the .vmx file to specify a .iso and boot from that. I know of others who have installed various versions of Windows under it as well.

Qemu (with kqemu also) slow like a hell if you want to run XP images or linux images.

The difference is that VMWare is a commercial product. Prior to this, you couldn't use it without either paying for a license or fetching a new trial license each month (and come up with a new working email address each time).

I don't honestly think it would matter. There all always ways around programs, and there are always people who will download the demo and google for a serial code. I have to assume that the player lacks some functionality or advanced features, and even if it doesn't and someone creates a set of scripts, thats probably not vmware's market. After all, if you want to install linux on Windows, you can always use colinux. Not as much polish, but it works and its free.
This would allow for an easy way to let people demo their os(as the teaser says) and I can see this being useful for a group of people who want to test cross-platform apps. That way they need one copy of vmware to create the image, and the developers can use the image to test their app.

QEMU can use vmdk disk image format - "VMware 3 and 4 compatible image format" (man qemu-img). If the Player can use this older format, one can create the image in QEMU and use it in VMWare.

The qemu-img tool that comes with QEmu is already capable of reading VMWare format disk image files, or converting between various disk image formats. The virtual machine configuration file is just a plain text file, and even though there are a lot of options, it would not be at all difficult to write a simple program to create them. The player seems to regenerate missing data (like incorrect UUIDs, or missing NVRAM files) automatically, just like VMWare Workstation does, so that's not a problem either.

They may have put some preventative measures in place, but they know that they'll be ineffective. If someone wants to use VMWare Player inappropriately, they're going to do it regardless. So their strategy is obviously more complicated than that.

Hmm... I must try this thing out with a Linux LiveCD. Assuming they haven't crippled it to prevent booting from a CD (I certainly would have), it could prove quite useful.

No, hardware that is not configured on the host OS is not available on the guest OS. So your firewire port would not be available.

I would think that's in order to prevent casual misuse.
The full VMWare Workstation installation contains the player (as does the demo).

It's Ubuntu, there is no root account. With sudo, the vmware user's passwords is (surprise) vmware.

I understand iSCSI only works with guest OS currently, but there will be support of iSCSI in ESX 3.0
BTW, thanks for the link.