QEMU & FreeOSZoo

QEMU CPU Emulator
"QEMU is a FAST! processor emulator using dynamic translation to achieve good emulation speed.

QEMU has two operating modes:

* Full system emulation. In this mode, QEMU emulates a full system (for example a PC), including a processor and various peripherials. It can be used to launch different Operating Systems without rebooting the PC or to debug system code.
*User mode emulation (Linux host only). In this mode, QEMU can launch Linux processes compiled for one CPU on another CPU. It can be used to launch the Wine Windows API emulator (http://www.winehq.org) or to ease cross-compilation and cross-debugging.

As QEMU requires no host kernel driver to run, it is very safe and easy to use.

For system emulation, the following hardware targets are supported:

PC (x86 processor)
PREP (PowerPC processor)
PowerMac (PowerPC processor, in progress)
For user emulation, x86, PowerPC, ARM, and SPARC CPUs are supported. "


FreeOSZoo homepage
"
Step 1 - Download and install QEMU emulator on your PC
Downloading QEMU emulator is the first step to Freedom. QEMU is able to emulate a virtual computer, including a processor and various peripherals. The emulated computer can be used to install and launch several Operating Systems (called 'Guest Operating Systems') without rebooting the PC. QEMU can be installed on a large variety of host platforms like FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and several Unix systems. We provide QEMU packages for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. "

Step 2 - Download and adopt a Free OS from the (FreeOS)Zoo
Before downloading a Free OS image, you must read and agree with the following conditions. FreeOSZoo is a free project independent from Operating System vendors. When you install a FreeOSZoo image, it is very likely that you will not be able to get support from official vendors. If you are not very familiar with Free Software, we recommend that you download the GNU/Linux SuSE 9.1 x86 image."

Now this looks officially cool. If I read this right, QEMU is a free VPC like product.

And on the FreeOSZoo there are already configured and installed OS images for QEMU.

Looks like I have a lot of downloading ahead of me... :)

(via Free Tools I need to install... )