Mike Kronenbert wrote ‘Q’; a free, open source virtual machine that can run windows and linux on Intel based Macs.

A completely rewritten cocoa port of QEMU, built directly on OS X, making use of Apples Core-technologies like Coreimage, Coreaudio and OpenGL for in- and output, saving the overhead of crossplattform APIs like SDL, FMOD or GTK.

This virtual machine is considered to be ‘Alpha’, it is considerably slower than other virtual machines such as Parallels but it seems fairly stable and you can’t beat the price.

You can find this free emulator for Mac OS X here; Q

Its been a while since Ive installed Linux and let me tell you this was a walk in the park. With little effort I installed Ubuntu with LVM across a couple disks, SSH, and Samba and it took no time at all.

Just look at the beautiful screenshots;

*** Hardware Malfunction

Call your hardware vendor for support

NMI: Parity Check / Memory Parity Error

*** The system has halted ***

At the time I was writing some code on my new Lenovo with an editor that has no auto-save.