Virtualization

dosemu

No, really! I want to run the Magnavox GPS program and possibly other ancient DOS programs that are used to set up old hardware.

There are actually dosemu and dosemu-freedos packages in Ubuntu. I need to try them.

VMWare

vmware desktop

vmware player

vmware server

Moving VMWare

If you want to move an installation to a new machine without rerunning installer, you need to move everything.

Directories and files that I know about (I specified the install in /usr/local instead of /usr)

/etc/vmware/
/etc/init.d/vmware
/usr/local/bin/vm*
/usr/local/lib/vmware
/usr/local/share/icons/
/usr/local/share/pixmaps/
/dev/vmnet/*

Bridged ethernet does not work on Ubuntu 5.10 so I use host-only, a minor nuisance because then I have to do routing and firewalling and forwarding on the host.

Compiling

I don't worry too much about preserving the kernel modules, I let the config program (vmware-config.pl) build a new one. To compile on Ubuntu you need gcc-3.4 package installed and before running the config script, do "export CC=gcc-3.4"

USB

Q. The Linux host grabs my printer with its usblp driver! Dang it!

A. List the module in /etc/hotplug/blacklist and it won't be loaded again. For example,

echo usblp >> /etc/hotplug/blacklist prevent the module from being reloaded
/etc/init.d/hotplug restart
modprobe -r usblp remove the module from memory, just in case it's still there

Now powercycle the printer and your Windows virtual machine should be able to grab it.

Xen

See http://www.xensource.com/ and http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/xen-tools