Free Operating Systems ZOO
From the home page…
FreeOSZoo provides ready-to-run images of QEMU virtual computers, pre-installed with a Free Operating System and a set of popular free software. To get started, you only need to install QEMU and download a single file from the FreeOSZoo project.
FreeOSZoo is targeted at end-users, who run proprietary Operating Systems because they are not aware of the existence of Free Operating Systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other free alternatives. For this audience, FreeOSZoo is the perfect tool for testing an Operating System without modifying their computer.
Here is the page collecting the qemu images.
Virtualization is a quite powerful and useful abstraction: the availability of self-contained ready-to-roll system image really lowers the barrier to test, study, hack, develop operating systems. Assuming you are using a quite powerful machine (e.g. a 2.0 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM Memory is suggested to have a smooth run) testing a complete software stack (operating system, database, web server, programming environment) is a push-botton experience or, in other words, it is one click away from you. It is also a huge step forward in the repeatability of software experiments, and hence in the scientific accurancy of software development; “provare et reprovare” in Galileo’s words.
This is also a nice chance to take a look at some forward-looking experiments in operating systems design as Plan9, a complete rethought of Unix concepts in a network oriented environment by the Lab who gave us Unix. The Plan9-updated image doesn’t work, or rather I didn’t find a 30-second way of getting into rio, the Plan9 window manager, however you’ll be able to download Plan9 image from the official site and boot it as a live cd to step into a quick view of the OS.
