Virtualization!
Not sure if that's a real word but it seems that everyone is going virtual lately. I've been enjoying VMware for the past few years and lately just found out VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/).
VirtualBox seems much faster than VMware. There seems to be a minor problem with NAT in XP host environment and Ubuntu as guest. Well, it turned out that it was not their fault. It's me who did not RTFM. I wasn't able to ping out so I thought this must be some routing problems. It wasn't. It was the DNS entry that Ubuntu placed it under the default setting. I changed the DNS entry to use our DNS servers by editing /etc/resolv.conf. That did it.
Sun just bought VirtualBox. Hopefully, they will continue improve this little app. I am enjoying it.
Thinstall is another one(http://www.thinstall.com). This one takes you to another level. Basically, your application will run in a virtual environment of its own, independent from the OS that it's running on top.
Say, you want to run Outlook under Thinstall. You basically create your own executable of Outlook and run it on either Vista, XP, or Win2K without any problem. It doesn't even care about licensing. I bet this will go away soon. VMware is now in control of Thinstall.
-foo
