Something I had seen but hadn’t really done anything with in recent years until the IBM summer camp. They had the students download the VMPlayer and do all their development there, in an Ubuntu box, which was brilliant. Even more brilliant to is set up the machine in advance, that way you don’t have configuration problems – an issue I had at an SMU workshop on developing Android apps.
The cool part for me, is that I can almost duplicate the computers at school so that when I make videos at home, the computer looks more like the lab computers. Not quite as confusing for the students.
VMPlayer is free. At http://www.vmware.com/products/player/ I did break down and by the educational version of VMWare Workstation.
Oh yes, you can play with Windows 8 now without breaking your PC.
Another thing I like it for is software development. You can set up and save your whole development system for a project on a virtual machine and then put it on a USB drive and carry it around. Wouldn’t put it on the cloud,but they do have servers for that. Download time is a bit slow.
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