Sun Microsystems has released a new version of VirtualBox - a powerful and flexible virtualization software. This is the kind of program that allows you to mount an OS in a virtual environment. You can then run software without affecting the status of your installed OS on a machine.

For a while, I used MS's Virtual PC, but just wound up going to it less and less. VMWare Player was kind of a kludge solution to running an OS virtually, imo, so I had more or less ignored the whole concept until VirtualBox came along. The User Guide is very complete; read it online or download the PDF on this page: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Another recent set of tutorials (prepared by a user) can be found here:
http://dottech.org/tipsntricks/14020
http://dottech.org/tipsntricks/14075

Looks like the writer plans more articles in this series.

Ron Moore