Something we do have a wide choice of in Ubuntu Linux (and on many other Linux platforms) is virtualisation software. Previously in this blog I've covered VirtualBox, which was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems. A new version of this software is out, but unfortunately the download repositories have been disabled and the downloads moved to an old fashioned manual download and install model thanks to "U.S. export regulations". I hope Sun sort this out soon. Another option though has been quietly developing and as available in (K)Ubuntu 8.10. The Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an an open source option to run virtual machines on your computer which can benefit from hardware acceleration many many modern CPUs to achieve near-native speeds for the guest images. The user friendliness of this software has been greatly improved through the addition of Virt-Manager, a GUI front end for KVM which means that you don't have to use the command line anymore to set up, monitor and run your virtual machines. I took this software out for a test drive by making a virtual machine that can run Ubuntu 8.04 (32 bit) on my Kubuntu 8.04 (64 bit) system, you could of course also have Microsoft Windows as a guest, the software emulates an entire machine.