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Unless your host OS happens to be Mac OS.
Mac OS as host OS? Oh, please. Why not Amiga OS?
For OSX as a host and guest there is a solution: > http://www.kberg.ch/qemu/

Mac is too proprietary to do ANYTHING for free. ... most wouldn't know what to do with virtualization software

I was using Q on my Intel MacBook(Qemu for OSX - http://www.kberg.ch/q/ ) and decided to try Parallels... dog-slow disk access made me switch back to Q. Q is GPL'd, and though it does not currently have virtualization, they are working on porting the Qemu accelerator and/or qvm86.

Just my opinion, but I would hold off on buying the third-party virtualization solution by Parallels (or any other company charging money) on the basis of a free open-source solution for now (the Q project based on QEMU) and the likelihood of a free commercial solution in the near future (VMware competing with Microsoft).

One person's experience with Q/QEMU on the Intel-based Macintosh computer.

Q is free. And, it it allows live switching (without rebooting) between virtual contexts, unlike BootCamp.

"Now that I have a chance..."

I know that most cultures have a sweet spot for hyperbole, but I am dumbfounded at how people say such things. Macintosh has always been the most compatible and accessible platform. Any one Mac can access the most operating systems either natively or via emulation than any other machine I've ever heard of. We've always had exceptionally fast emulators and native virtual machines, and for most people, VirtualPC or Qemu are better than a 'real' one. Drag-and-drop desktop-to-desktop integration and undoable filesystems are a lot more than "nice to have" when trying to keep Windows alive.

Well, good luck to ya in finally discovering your own world, Mr. Unfrozen Caveman I.T. Guy! ;-)

I'm exactly the person you described. I'm a Web designer who does some programming/scripting: javascipt, ruby, php. I never touch a windows machine except to use IE to test Web pages I'm working on. I have no idea what software is available exclusively for Windows, because it doesn't concern me. When bootcamp was released, I did buy a copy of XP. (Although, I know someone who used to work at M$, he called someone he knew that still worked there, and got it for $42 shipped) I bought it one, just to fool around with, and two, so I could use Q to run both operating systems side-by-side for easier testing.

Frankly, I find it a little pompous you assume a Macintosh user is somehow to inferior to have implemented this idea, and a little naive to think everyone on the planet needs windows boxes to get through day-to-day life.

By the looks of it, this project "Q" is a (free) virtualization layer for OSX which runs windows or any other OS. Anybody have experience with it?

You can already run non-Apple OSes in a window on the Intel-based Macs by way of the Q Project (based on the open source QEMU). Commercial virtualization solutions are being worked on by VMWare, Microsoft, and Parallels, among others. Parallels' Workstation 2.1 for Mac OS X appears to be first to market (althought it, like Boot Camp, is beta software).

Have you tried Q? It works on my home iBook, but is rather slower. I'd love to see how it runs on a new powerbook. http://www.kberg.ch/q/ [kberg.ch]

Have you tried Q? It works on my home iBook, but is rather slower. I'd love to see how it runs on a new powerbook.
http://www.kberg.ch/q/

Check out Q. It allows running Windows while running OS X (unlike the dual boot onmac.net approach).

Qemu is already running on intel macs :-)

http://www.kberg.ch/q/index.php?sid=237768&p=0

And the developers are working on the virtualization stuff too.

If you really can't find a Mac equivalent or a more Mac-like way of doing what you're accustomed to on Windows, Q is a Cocoa port of QEMU, and apparently it works fairly well. YMMV.

Ah, but I don't think Virtual PC works under Rosetta, does it?

It doesn't. Q does, but XP doesn't quite work on it yet.

There is one or two already... Xen and Q for example.

There is also VirtualPC (sloow and buggy)

I've been using VMware for years now on my personal laptop. It's barely usable in speed terms.

But why use any of these? I'm not interested in running small PC apps my grandma gave me on a CD she got from the cover of PCWorld magazine! And there is nothing I really need to run on my Mac apart from games and doing .NET 2.0 development, and unfortunately emulation does not cut it for games.

Let see, there is Omnigraffle? for Visio replacement, MS Office, Java SAPGUI for OSX (not perfect though) and many more equivalent applications.

No, I would have to say, I would primarily need Windows for games and thus practically require it to dual boot.

I've got an old iBook, a DELL Inspiron laptop and a fastish desktop, and I'll replace all of this with a sleep, light MacBook Pro. (Since I will be traveling soon, and will need something to play Oblivion and X3 on...)

Emulation is cool, granted... but native for games is even better. ;)

This is just a very first test on universal binaries for Q. Expect flaws! No virtualization yet, but it's way faster than on PPC never the less.

This is just a very first test on universal binaries for Q. Expect flaws! No virtualization yet, but it's way faster than on PPC never the less.

The guys working on Q are working towards a virtualized environment.

The current version is an emulated environment based on QEMU. It's quite fast, but they have stated in the forums that they are working on a virtualizer kernel extension that will run at near native speeds (like VMWare does.)

For the work that I'm doing, it's VERY handy to have a copy of Windows 2000 Pro running IE 5, 5.5 and 6 on the Intel iMac. There are still rough edges during the install, but it's definitely a great piece of software with a very promising future.

-ch

Check out the QEMU webpage here
A nice GUI interface for OSX is here
And another GUI interface is here

Considering that the majority of the time one will be able to run native OSX apps, the QEMU solution looks pretty good.

Willy

I own an OS X machine but I'm kind of a tinkerer and I'd love to install it in an emulation environment like Q (which incidentally is the first released and working Intel-on-Intel emulator for OS X, with at least some of the expected performance gain over emulating Windows on PowerPC) to try it out.

Uh, no thanks, but that avenue's already taken care of.