I'm a big fan of the new run of live discs we've seen in the last few years and use Linux natively quite often however, it is common for me to have to use a windows machine so a virtual machine is a great way to have access to a Linux terminal, ssh and other cool tools without having to use Putty, Poderosa or Cygwin, dual booting or swapping between machines.

However, I wish to use a distro of my own choosing and change the amount of CPU's and RAM available, as the default in many cases is only 256 Mb RAM and 1 CPU (I'm referring of course to dual and quad core CPUs not clustering). I find very few sources on how to create a virtual machine for free or without having to use Microsoft's Virtual PC.

I will probably use Virtual Box or VMWare Player. I would like to use Linux Mint 6 (Main Edition 32/64) as the choice distro.

Please can I have some input on building one. Thanks in advance.

Personally I am fond of VMware Server, which gives you the control you want over your virtual environment and enables you to make your own VM with whatever distro you want.

It is free, as in beer, it just requires you to register with VMware.

Thanks for that, I didn't realise it was free, I thought only VMPlayer was free. I'll check out VMWare Server.

I'm using VirtualBox for all my VMs.
Can assign max 3.5 GB to each VM and max 128 MB video memory to each machine.
So if you need more than that, have to look into other options.
All Linux Distributions I have tried worked without a problem (Fedora Core 10, Debian Lenny, Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex, and 2 others based on Debian and Ubuntu)
Did however have problems trying to get Free/Open/PCBSD running.

Not sure what VMWare Server can do, didn't have time yet to play around with it (apart from just installing it so far).

How did you create the virtual machine? I'm testing EasyVMX and will probably try Virtualbox too.

All my VMs are with virtual box, if you mean that.
Host machine is Vista 64 ultimate.

Once you start virtual box, it's relatively easy to set up a VM, couple clicks here and there, and you're basically ready to go.

If your lazy like me and require a few oses for testing, then http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=213555 would be your best bet. Just download and open up with VirtualBox.

VMWare keep a small Virtual Machine repository. This repository of 'Appliances' as they are known, are a great place to get one or two machines to play with or use if you don't want the headache of making your own.

If you are a Linux distro, where's yours? You could be missing a great opportunity. Making a VM isn't the same as just getting one. It would be great to see the whole distro-watch top 10 in here. Thanks for your link w3bd3vil.

Linked from VMWare.