[CQ-Contest] Virtualization Software

[David Gilbert]

My oldest son is a software engineer working for a company in Tucson, 
but on his own he's lately been playing around with computer 
virtualization, a software concept that essentially allows a user to run 
different or even multiple operating systems on the same computer 
without overlap or interaction.  In essence, the computer gets 
reconfigured to think it is more than one machine.  This is not the same 
as an emulator ... software running on a virtual machine supposedly runs 
at native speeds.  Corporate IT organizations like it because it gives 
them much more flexibility in running different systems without having 
to buy different computers, and for a while VMWare (one of the more high 
profile purveyors of the technology) was a high flier on Wall Street.

My son recently discovered an outfit called VirtualBox that offers the 
same capability under a free GPL license.  He downloaded it and tried it 
with Windows 2K on a Mac laptop and says it works great, but it 
supposedly will run almost any operating system on almost any host 
system.  That excludes the Mac OS, of course, since you can't legally 
buy a copy that is not bundled with a computer.

I suspect that there are Mac owners out there who'd like to be able to 
run Windows-based amateur radio (i.e., contesting) software on it, and 
this seems like it might be an effective way to accomplish that.  Is 
there anyone who has played around with this already or has an opinion 
on it?

I have no connection with any of this other than my son's inputs, but 
more info can be found at www.virtualbox.org

73,
Dave   AB7E