VMWare - What a Trip!

I know that title dates me, but what the hell. I am having far too much fun with VMWare's Player, running on my Windows XP laptop. I have been doing a lot of work on a system running Fedora Core 4 and have always run my web servers under some flavor of Linux. With the demise of my workstation at home and needing to do more work in the Linux versus the Windows environment, I have been using Cygwin to make my life easier. Unfortunately, it just ain't Linux and the software that is available under Cygwin is usually not the most up-to-date if it is available at all. Recent (mis)adventures with the official Cygwin ports repository caused me much lost time rebuilding my Cygwin setup four times (you think I would have figured it out after the first failure). Anyway, I had heard and tried a very very early release of VMware and it didn't work out too well. I was reading an article online about VMware's contest to create virtual environments for the player so I decided to go have a look. What I discovered was a fairly long list of Linux environments that had been setup, including the latest Fedora Core 5. So, with a 700MB+ download and a fairly painless installation, I now have a fully functional Linux machine running on my laptop, side-by-side with Windows. Because of a lack of hard drive space, I do have the virtual environment off on network drive so I can't work away from home, but this provides some interesting possibilities for my new (sometime in the future) laptop. I was having issues about going to a 100% Linux environment, but, with VMware, I can do that and run whatever Windows applications in a Windows virtual machine - yes, the VMware player is also available for Linux - a nice way to turn the tables around and have a pleasant development environment while still be able to use some of the creature comfort toys (like Sling Player) in a virtual one. More on this as I see how things work out - right now using my favorite updating tool, yum, to bring my FC5 desktop up to current, with 332 packages changed.