Burst Attention Span

Ever felt like you just don’t have enough computers? As a web developer, I often need to test sites on a number of target platforms and browsers but it isn’t practical to have a machine for each setup.

Late last year, VMWare released a player version of their full Virtual Machine Workstation product. This utility uses ready made disk images or ‘appliances’ with pre-installed OS and software. The only restriction was that the player cannot create new virtual machines. Was a restriction… :)

The following links will help you download and create as many virtual machines as you need, for use with VMWare Player. For example, I currently have a machine running XP with the excrable IE7 installed, while my productive OS hasn’t been soiled.

Creating an XP Pro VM
How to create virtual machines using VMware Player

Software/Tools
VMXWizard – Win32 EXE
ISO Recorder – Burn ISOs natively in XP
VM Builder – Online form
EasyVMX – Online form

Operating Systems
DOS7.1
Knoppix (Linux) installer image ¦ appliance (you need both)

Appliances
More Appliances
Network Analysis
Multi Browser
Old DOS Games

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 11:06 am and is filed under Computing Life, Web Development.