This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.
A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher includes a snapshot feature to quickly revert broken installations back to a working state. Hypervisor installers and shortcuts to run the VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are also included.
↫ Andrew Warkentin’s Virtual OS Museum
These types of preconfigured archives exist in the gaming world, but I’ve never seen something like this for operating systems. The amount of love, work, and care that have gone into this effort must’ve been immense, as it contains more than 1700 installs, more than 520 platforms, and more than 570 distinct operating systems, all wrapped into a single download, with a nice launcher on top to make using all of this as easy as possible. You can either download the full offline version at 121GB zipped, or a version that downloads each image as you fire them up for the first time at 14GB zipped.
The contents span just about everything from early mainframes to desktop operating systems to all kinds of mobile platforms, from the late 1940s to today. I haven’t yet found the time to download the whole thing, but I am absolutely going to, as there are so many names in here that I’ve been wanting to play around with for ages, but just never got the time to set up virtual machines or emulators for.
This is going to be an amazing resource for the kinds of people who read OSNews.
