VMware have been making their virtual machine technology for some time, and I've been a long time fan (and beta tester) of the product since the original version.

Now VMware are making their VMware player available for free. Basically a run-only version of the VMware software, it means that you can run a virtual machine, assuming, of course, that a virtual machine already exists for you to use. From the official blurb:

VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server and also supports Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats.

VMware have been making their virtual machine technology for some time, and I've been a long time fan (and beta tester) of the product since the original version.

Now VMware are making their VMware player available for free. Basically a run-only version of the VMware software, it means that you can run a virtual machine, assuming, of course, that a virtual machine already exists for you to use. From the official blurb:

VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server and also supports Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats.

I'm having trouble at the moment getting everything I need to done, and I'm sure part of that is that I keep getting interrupted or distracted by things.

Luckily, I've come across a new distraction which might help, this audio program on interruption science, the study of distractions during our normal work day.

I haven't listened to it yet, because I've just spotted an email I need to respond to.

I'll be right back. Honest....

Greg Nawrocki was talking about grids and virtualization a few days, something I covered.

Now he has an interesting piece of the use of open source software for virtualization, such as Xen (making its way into Linux distributions, from Computerworld). As usual, Greg is right to point out that open source models could help accelerate the use of virtual technology for grids, something only previously thought about in terms of VMware up to now.

Linux is coming to the desktop, and if the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and Free Standards Group (FSB) have anything to do with it, then it will based on some standards that the different Linux distributions can adhere to and that make using Linux as a desktop operating system much easier.

First off we start with the launch of the Linux Standard Base Desktop Project. The basics of the project are also described in this piece at eWeek.

At EclipseWorld this year I presented tools for developing Python and Perl applications within the Eclipse IDE. These were extensions built and released by enthusiastic programmers who needed the tools, developed them, and decided to let other interested people (like me) use them.

Now it seems Zend are going to be formally joining the Eclipse project, as detailed in this Computerworld piece.

This is great news. PHP is a wonderfully rich web development platform, and Eclipse could give us the ability to develop and deploy PHP apps in a straightforward and intelligent manner. We can already develop HTML in Eclipse, so the merging of the two makes sense.

I'm a big fan of Asterisk, the VoIP exchange system, even if I'm not yet in a position to make use of it at the moment.

Asterisk is difficult to configure and is such a rich and capable application that getting to know how to configure everything can be a problem, so a good book is always useful.

O'Reilly's Asterisk book was released under a creative commons license, and it is now available to download for free, as noted here.