Amid wrestling with getting Xen working (its kernel doesn’t play nicely with my video drivers… oh how I hate closed-source drivers), I downloaded VMware player. It’s free.

I first downloaded a VMware image of Mailserver by Allard Consulting. Quick review: I’ve never used it in a ‘real’ environment to send or receive e-mail (and I screwed up VMware’s networking, making things worse), but it seems extremely impressive. The one thing I have realized is that my much-raved-about spamd is very irritating if you try to telnet to port 25 to ‘test’ the mailserver. If I had a colocated server hosting multiple VPSs *cough* I think I’d buy the ‘real deal’ from them and use this as my mailserver.

But I think I’m going to get entirely distracted with virtual machines tonight. I’m running the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu, 7.10, codenamed “Gusty Gibbon.” But 8.04, code-named “Hardy Heron” is in early testing, and you can grab an image of it. (You can also run it on your desktop, it’s in no way ‘proprietary,’ but a lot of us aren’t hardcore enough to want to run bleeding-edge alpha code as our main OS.)

I’ve mentioned before that I was somewhat interested in the $300 PCs that Walmart was selling. They came with Linux, apparently something Google partnered with them on, dubbing the desktop environment “gOS.” (The machine also draws insanely low power.) Lo an behold, it’s out there as a VMware image. (I was also able to play around with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) image in VMware.)

Oh, and Solaris anyone?