VMWare

VMware Player and Server

Proprietary but "free of charge" (NOT floss) virtualisation software from VMware

(If you want a floss virtualiser try VirtualBox instead)

VMware Player 3.x

Try VMware player FIRST ! Its a simple "one-click" .BUNDLE install on almost any distro variant !

Verdsion 2.x works on PIIIs and Version 3 requires a P4 with PAE but now lets you create VMs from scratch as well as running pre-built ones !

VMware 2.x on Karmic (9.10)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Vmware
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VmwareEsx
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VmwarePlayer
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VmwareServer
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VmwareWorkstation

To enable VMware Server to work on Ubuntu 9.10 may require a Linux Kernel rebuild.

There is an excellent "How To" document located at:

www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-vmware-server-1.0.x-on-an-ubuntu-9.10-desktop

One issue was concerned with the installation of the custom kernel, specifically this step:

dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.31.4-custom_2.6.31.4-custom-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb 
linux-headers-2.6.31.4-custom_2.6.31.4-custom-10.00.Custom_amd64.deb

The installation complained that line 1186 of the nvidia-common postinst script returned error 20. Although a resolution to fix the issue didn't seem to be available, the following steps allowed the installation to proceed:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-common
sudo apt-get purge nvidia-common

Once these steps have completed, the dpkg command above can be re-run.