Imagine if the author of the following had been thinking specifically of Iraq:

Suppose the United States, in consequence of outrages perpetrated upon its citizens, was obliged to move its armies or send its fleets to obtain redress, and it came to pass that an expensive war resulted and culminated in the occupation of a portion of the territory of the enemy, and that the retention of such territory — an event illustrated by examples in history — could alone enable the United States to recover the pecuniary loss it had suffered. And suppose, further, that to do so would require occupation for an indefinite period, dependent upon whether or not payment was made of the required indemnity. [If it were] true that incorporation must necessarily follow the retention of the territory, it would result that the United States must abandon all hope of recouping itself for the loss suffered by the unjust war, and hence the whole burden would be entailed upon the people of the United States. This would be a necessary consequence, because if the United States did not hold the territory as security for the needed indemnity it could not collect such indemnity, and, on the other hand, if incorporation must follow from holding the territory the uniformity provision of the Constitution would prevent the assessment of the cost of the war solely upon the newly acquired country.

Ex. Doc. Senate, 55th Congress, 2d sess., Report No. 681

My dad was in the Navy, a long time ago. And at some point (perhaps even before he was in the Navy) he got interested in sea chanties. He used to sing the following to me when I was a little boy, as a sort of lullaby.

A beetle bug went sailing out to sea
Yo-ho
A beetle bug went sailing out to sea
In a cozy peanut shell
He felt the billow swell
Do you think he was afraid?
Not he, yo-ho.
Do you think he was afraid?
Not he, yo-ho.

The beetle bug was cast upon the sand
Yo-ho
The beetle bug was cast upon the sand
He had traveled miles away
But he settled down to stay
"For my proper home," said he, "is on the land."
"For my proper home," said he, "is really on the land."

I wish I could find the music. Alas, google turns up zilch.

Watch the 2008 video. Then read some of the comments. And then read what the composer had to say.

A very good thing, and exceedingly beautiful. Matt++

I decided I wanted to run some virtual machines. My first thought was VMware, since I have experience with that at work and I really like it. But I went with Microsoft's Virtual PC instead, for a couple of reasons:

1. I figured it would have better integration to the host OS (which in my case is XP) than VMware.
2. It is free for all uses, whereas VMware is free only for certain classes of use. (Not that this would necessarily have affected me.)

However, after experiencing lots of problems with Virtual PC, I have decided to junk it and go to VMware.

To run a virtual machine (vm), you have to create a "bare" virtual machine instance and install an OS onto it. Alternatively, you might be able to find vm instances on the Internet, already loaded with an OS and ready to run.

With Virtual PC, I tried the first way. I thought it would be easy.

I tried installing Ubuntu and Knoppix (Linux variants) and had nothing but problems.

When I tried installing SuSE Linux 9.1 from original CDs, I had success. This was the only Virtual PC vm I ever managed to get running. However, it too had some - relatively minor - problems:

1. Very often, keystrokes from the keyboard get sent into the vm multiple times. For example, I'd try to type http and get httpppppppppppp.
2. After a few days, the vm no longer recogized (connected to) the Ethernet port on the host machine. That meant that not only could I not do anything on the Internet, but I couldn't connect to the SMB shares on my network.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but, maybe Virtual PC detected that the guest OS was Linux, and intentionally snockered it?

Anyway, I decided to switch to VMware, to see if I would at least not have these problems.

On the VMware web site, in the same download area where you find the VMware Player, you also find a catalog of vm instances ready to download and run. Most if not all of these are third-party "appliances", in a wide array of application categories. They have several Linux flavors, and I downloaded some. I never even bothered trying to install an OS into a bare VMware instance from scratch.

So I got to thinking - Does Microsoft have a similar catalog of vm instances for Virtual PC? The short answer is No. There's a good reason for that: There is no free Windows OS. And Microsoft clearly can't condone running any other OS, although Virtual PC does (more or less) support any OS.

Upon further searching, I found that the above statement is not entirely true: they do have a number of products available for evaluation in the form of Virtual PC instances; but (big surprise) they are all Microsoft products, and they are all "trials" or "betas".

Even further googling turned up this: a SuSE Virtual PC instance.

At this point, I have nothing to be gained by trying it. It's VMware all the way for me now.

See also:

• Xen - a virtualization engine now owned by Citrix
• Virtual Iron - a virtualization engine which runs on bare metal.
• VM Toolkit - blogs; tools (mostly VHD focused)
• Virtualization Daily - news in the VM world
• JumpBox - lots of vm instances ready to run, and available for "all the popular virtualization systems", including VMware and Virtual PC.
• VM Planet; forums
  

Google for "vhd to vmdk". Techniques exist, such as using Winimage tool.

Update:

I successfully used WinImage to convert a .vhd file to a .vmdk file, and linked the .vmdk file into an existing VMware instance. WinImage is a pretty amazing tool. I want to see what else it can do before the 30-day eval period is up.

I discovered some more interesting things: VMware Workstation (a mere $189) can do all kinds of amazing things as far as sharing disks and devices between host and guest OSes. And it can run Virtual PC vm's directly.

Update:

rBuilder is another site with numerous "virtual appliances", usually available for all major virtualization engines.