Doh!!! I 've installed so many Linux distors lately I was stuck in linux mode. When I went through the wizard I chose linux 2.6 for the machine type. Doesn't work for winxp. I'm now happily?? installing winxp.

Hi,
I'm looking at putting Linux into a vmware machine so I have something to play with. I am running XP Pro as my host, what flavor of Linux would you recommend and how big a disk should I make it so it runs good but I'm not wasting space at this pt.

Thanks, Bryan

There are two that will really give you the real experience of Linux and showcase its capabilities. Try PClinuxOS and Linux Mint. One's desktop is KDE and the other is Gnome. I create 4GB VM's and have plenty of room for everything. If you can allocate at least 512MB ram to the vm go ahead and do so but I have found they run very well on 256MB. Both versions of linux above are "live CD's". That means you can boot them on your real computer and run them live. They make no changes whatsover to your hard drive. When you are done playing, you can just shutdown and no residual changes are left over. Under vmware you can do all the playing you want, obviously. Have fun!

If you want to "play" with a variety of Linux flavors, you might want to save yourself the installation time and configuration concerns by just using a pre-built Linux "appliance."

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

I know many on this forum would prefer to install each OS themselves to see what the installer is like, but for this phase of your experimentation, just having a running system might suit you just fine.