VMWARE

try out Knoppix , it does not need any install at all

vmware is an excellent software for having running versions of various OS all at the same time you can have solaris linux win 98 win 2000 all running at the same time. The only draw back is that its expensive you can try out another software thats free called zen. I personally have not used it but i belive its good.

Yeah as many have pointed out VMware is a great to experiment be it Operating Systems,playing around with stuff without worrying screwing up anything.But apart from being expensive its a "emulation" which has to be slow in a way.
From my personal experience VMware is great if you have the resources[RAM] the slowness is what kills all the usability & features,atleast it did for me,I have 256MB RAM but for your present situation you are better off with a linux live cd.There are loads of them available,knoppix being the best of them all afaik.

One more good utilisation of vmware is to check out any new windows software you download. Let me elaborate if you setup say win XP in vmware inside say Linux and you want to try out a new utility, then install it in the vmware winxp , run ethereal on the host linux OS and see what happens are there any connections to the net being made is the new software behaving itself if you are satisfied then load the same to your orignal win XP.
I do this at my place and this has realy helped me from getting into trouble many times. Yes vmware is resource hungry but then with say 512M you should be able to do a three to four OS load at one time. On my 1GB P42,4 i have done a max of 14 OS run at the same time simmulating an entire network with routers to fix a network problem.
In short vmware is an excellent fault diagnostic tool also.

pradeep_chauhan said:

One more good utilisation of vmware is to check out any new windows software you download. Let me elaborate if you setup say win XP in vmware inside say Linux and you want to try out a new utility, then install it in the vmware winxp , run ethereal on the host linux OS and see what happens are there any connections to the net being made is the new software behaving itself if you are satisfied then load the same to your orignal win XP.

Click to expand...

Thats exactly the reason I used it.But now I'm happy loading windump & studying the metrics for various programs.Perhaps if I upgrade RAM in future I 'll happily get back to VMware.Btw has anyone tried MS Virtual PC,I read somewhere that it is a bit faster than VMware,anything interesting with virtual pc?

1) Vmware is also good to start learning networking especially realted to Linux and BSD withoug paying high fees and purchasing switch, lan cards etc.
2) You can also try the new kernels
3) You can learn ethical hacking

As i said earlier there is a free software called zen try it it too is good.

But I don`t thing it`s realy worth if u r realy curious about linux,
It hv cetain major draw-backs too---
1- Great resource demanding.
2- Need same resources as u r installing it on a HDD partetion (means u need to full fill distros requirement for HDD)
3- Emulation can never give u the same experience as the real one, at least not till last time i tested it on my system

so if u r a real newbie then i`ll suggest u to go with live distro,

but like nix hv said if u want to learn networking(* which is not very expensive & even after using this u can`t learn all the things & i think nix know this better then i know) & u hv a good resource system then go for it..............

the resource hungrey thing is realy relative With the powerfull hardware (read P4,512MB) genrally available its not that difficult to do emulation. Also the resources needed are also virtulised so you actually do not need that many resources. Aslo the speed is very good if i run win 2000 in vmware its hard for any one to guess as to its the virtual thing or a full hardware install.
Again i would say vmware is a lovely tool to study the behaviour of an OS and the components installed in it. The old idea of it being heavy slow etc are not true and any standard machine can run this with ease.

Considering lower price of hardware these days especially RAM you can easily go with vmware. Here is my system configuration
Celeron 1.7 GHZ
Windows XP SP2
512+256MB RAM
20 GB IDE ATA 100 HDD
845 Chipset board
I run vmware under XP and runs at least 3 os at a time
OBSD 3.6
FBSD 4.10
Debian 3.x with XFCE

When all three starts only that time system get bit busy otherwise it works nicely.

Nix i don't know hw fine does it workes with that massive amount of RAM
but for me
WinXP is like hell coz
for my projects i hv installed,
Oracle 9i,(* includes about 10 proces starts with windows)
Matlab,
Net freamworks,
IBM WSAD,
DW.....
so after that i seems to working on 64 MB RAM rather then my own 512MB,

and as far as i think people still don`t bye more then 256MB RAM,
but yes for starting emulation is not bad......