Aczid's blog

When using Firefox on GNU/Linux to test web apps all day, there comes a point where you wonder whether things would work (as well) in Internet Explorer. Although there are Wine configurations to run IE on Linux, I decided I'd rather just run Windows in in a VM.
Thinking I'd use a open source solution I struggled for a while trying to create VM's with Qemu. Those, unfortunately, didn't even get through the Windows XP CD bootloader.

Desperate to get it to work (easily) I decided I'd give VMware workstation a try. We had a licence already.
I downloaded the 6.0 tgz, compiled it and clicked through the wizard to create a VM. But when I tried to register I noticed the licence we had was for VMware workstation 5.0!

I discovered that although the workstation version of VMware won't allow you to actually run the virtual machines that you create with it, the free VMware player will run those just fine!

After booting up the VM in vmplayer the Windows installer ran flawlessly. I'm now the happy user of a free as in beer virtualized Windows installation! I am however somewhat embarrassed to admit I couldn't create a fully functional VM with Qemu.