Enough of this reading about virtualization, I'm just gonna do it already! To get my feet wet, I installed the 30-day free trial of VMware Workstation for my Ubuntu 7.10 system, hoping to have several guest OSes on my primary Linux desktop. I must say, so far I am quite impressed!

I downloaded the 270 MB (or so) Tarball from VMware's Web site and used the help from this page to make sure I did everything right: http://shirwablog.com/content/how-install-vmware-workstation-6-ubuntu-7…

The installation process is pretty long but it mostly consists of hitting the Return key around 30 times. The documentation for VMware Workstation is also quite good and is recommended.

My hope is to get a whole slew of OSes running virtually, just for the fun of it. But my original motivation was to get Windows XP running virtually so I can us the Yahoo! Music Engine (Y!ME) on my Linux desktop. Unfortunately, Y!ME is an application that doesn't run on the available emulators like Wine.

I have yet to install Windows XP as a guest OS because I have no idea where my Windows XP CD is. So to start the tinkering process, I installed openSUSE 10.3 and am distracted with that for the time being. It is such a trip to be able to toggle back and forth between separate Linux distros!

Today is only the first day of my trial, but already I am doing a cost-benefit analysis in my head. Do I keep the VMware Workstation and get the Windows XP client running - and in a month shell out $189 once the trial is over? Or, should I cancel the Yahoo! Unlimited Music Service, and opt for the browser-based Rhapsody Music Service that will run on Linux? The wrinkle there is that the Yahoo! service only costs $6 per month while the Rhapsody costs nearly double. Furthermore, I think that my wife and I have almost a year left on our Yahoo! Music contract, though I bet we can get a prorated refund.

I have this nagging feeling that I will get hooked on this thing.