A couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to the concept of running virtual computers inside one computer.

Currently I run two macbooks. One of them dual boots with OSX Snow Leopard/Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala. The other dual boots with OSX Snow Leopard/Windows XP SP2. Mostly I use Ubuntu 9.10, but it would be nice to try some other distributions, which is where the virtual machines come in handy. I've installed the non-free version of Virtualbox from Oracle (no fee for single computer installations) into one of my OSX systems. So far I have put Ubuntu 10.04 LTS into it and now I am in the process of installing Debian Lenny 5.0.5.

There are limitations to using virtual box over a straight bootable partion. Not all USB is supported and I suspect that the machines won't run as fast either. Also things like ram are split between the host OS and the Guest OS. At the moment I am allocating half the ram to each. It will be interesting to see how well it goes.