Freak Installations of Vista, Linux and Mac OS X on the Same PC

Freak installations of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X running in parallel inside virtual machines on the same computer is the future envisioned by Dell chief technology officer, Kevin Kettler. The U.S. computer manufacturer that is in bed with Window Vista, Windows XP and the Ubuntu distribution of Linux presented a perspective in which PCs will be able to run the two versions of Windows, as well as the open source Linux operating system simultaneously on a single computer via virtualization technology.

Kettler even went as far as to demonstrate such a scenario with the XenSource hypervisor, joggling between Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, Windows Vista, and Windows XP. Additionally, Kettler also underscored the necessity to separate and use multiple operating system resources in accordance with various tasks, illustrating the vision with an example of Firefox running in its own virtual machine. "I envision in the future clients having eight or nine operating systems on them that are all virtualized," Kettler revealed as cited by PC World. "I think the Linux community is poised to be innovative and to create these virtual machine environments more than anyone else can today."

However, Microsoft fails to see eye to eye with Dell on the matter of virtualizing Windows on top or along the Linux open source operating system. Speaking on the subject at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, Sam Ramji, Microsoft Director of Platform Strategy revealed that the Redmond company would not accept scenarios with Windows Vista and Windows XP running in hardware emulating technology on top of Linux.

"What we have heard predominantly from customers is that they want to be able to mix and match their data center applications, but we haven't seen significant demand for Linux applications on the desktop or for desktop virtualization on top of Linux," Ramji commented during his address for the "Linux and Windows Interoperability: On the Metal and on the Wire" session according to eWeek. "We get no significant request for desktop virtualizations across platforms."

Kettler instead dares to dream as far as Vista, XP, Linux and Mac OS X bundled via virtualization on a single computer, although he failed to comment on the possibility of transitioning the Apple operating system to the PC. "I can't speculate on that," Kettler said to InformationWeek. "Virtualization is very powerful. It's an environment that would allow many different operating systems to co-exist. You can interpret that however you would like."