So the other night I got bored and looked into playing with different OSes on my Mac Pro. Now of course you can dual boot with Boot Camp but I don’t wanna partition my drive since I don’t plan on keeping the installs around. I could run something like Parallels or VMWare Fusion but those cost money. I actually want to have another OS sitting on my machine instead of just running one app so CrossOver is out. Wine is kind of confusing. So I try out two programs I’ve read about: Q and VirtualBox. Q is a port of the QEMU emulator. It’s lightweight and you can emulate a decent amount of hardware configurations with it. It’s a little buggy but if you just want to test out another OS it’s nice. VirtualBox is a little more thorough in the setup. There’s more to configure but it also leads to a more stable install. The guest OSes load faster with this one.I don’t have a copy of Windows sitting around so I opt for the next best thing – ReactOS. This Open Source Operating System supports Windows drivers and runs a good number of applications. It’ll be fun to try should I miss that occasional Windows app. I also decide to test out a version Ubuntu. Why? Because it’s stable, Open Source, popular, and I figure I should at least check Linux out. I’ll test out other OSes as I find them, should they give me a decent disk image to test. I’ve had a few problems with using these apps, mostly do to mouse clicking and capturing things from the host computer and sending them to the guest OS. But for free programs I can’t complain too much. It’s really nice to be able to install another Operating System on your machine and then remove it like nothing ever happened should you find you don’t like it.