best free virtual OS to run Linux in Windows 7
 

Hi,

I am a new Linux user. I have to start a project in "Network Simulation 3" (NS3). I use windows and i dont want to partition my harddisk to run Linux. I have installed Cygwin which emulates Linux. Can you please suggest which Virtual Machine software i can use (free, of course) to run Linux in Windows. VMware is not free.

virtualbox?

thanks for the suggestion
 

Hey frieza,

thanks for the suggestion. suse Linux or fedora (lots of versions). I'm confused.

depends on what you really want to do with your virtual machine, if you are looking for a production system like a webserver, than perhaps centos or debian, if you are looking for more bleeding edge than perhaps fedora

I installed a variety of Linux systems on my Windows 7, in the end, I decide that RHEL/Centos and SuSe will be the one I want to learn, as other people have said earlier, it all depends on your need, make sure you have at least 8GB and 4core (I have 6 core and 16GB memory) my experience is the latest Ubuntu is sluggish! :D

thanks shfyang. i am using fedora 18 for now. but i am having difficulty installing it in virtual box. after the installation is complete virtualbox crashes when i reboot!

That's unfortunate and unusual. Any clues in the VirtualBox logs?

Assuming you are using a recent VirtualBox (version 4.2?), another possible solution would be to try an earlier version. 3.2 might be a good choice; it was very stable.

I'm using VirtualBox (v4.2.12) and i tried installing fedora 18.

Virtualbox is what you need..
It's very stable.

VMplayer is free for non-commercial use.

Virtualbox should not crash. If it does then look at event logs for clues to why it did.

It may be that you didn't assign enough resources to the VM.

You don't really need 8G ram and a quad core. I have used VM's on some very low resource systems. More is almost always better. Many new computer have special virtual machine features built in. Be sure to enable in bios if not already or available.