Community

Community built VMs for VMWare Player

For those who are unaware, offers the free VMWare player. It’s an ok way to bridge the gap between not having any virtualization and a full-blown VMWare Workstation. There are only a limited number of pre-built Virtual Machines for VMWare player from the VMWare site, however.

There are instructions online on how to install a new OS in VMWare Player, but of course that means that you can’t install VMWare Tools.

The better solution (for the short term) is to allow those who have a full VMWare Workstation installed to create virtual machines for use in the player. Riding to the rescue on this front is vmwarez.com – a site that offers prebuilt virtual machines of Open Source OSes for use in VMWare Player. And I see that there are finally some community built machines showing up on the VMWare site now, as well.

I would, however, still recommend getting VMWare Workstation as soon as you can. It is more than worth it!