VMware, the virtual platform technology that was the toast of Demo ’99 (CI No 3,600), will be available for Linux from Saturday, May 15. A fully supported commercial release will be available for an introductory price of $199, alongside a non- commercial version for the student and hobbyist market, priced at $99. The latter is expected to go down a treat with the Slashdot crowd, who are eager to get Windows applications running on their Linux machines without the performance hit exacted by Windows emulators. Unlike an emulator, VMware apparently takes control of the entire machine, letting the application talk directly to the hardware.
