Wubble

Today, as part of our VMworld 2005 festivities, we announced our VMware Player. This is a freely downloadable tool that, as you might guess, plays virtual machines. People who’ve been participating in the Workstation 5.5 beta programme will have already seen it in its bundled form, but now you can get it as a stand-alone product. We’ve also released a special Browser Appliance virtual machine that’s based on Ubuntu Hoary featuring Firefox, so if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to checkout our virtualisation technology, grab the player and the VM and try it out. There are also a number of other VMs hosted at VMTN, and that collection should grow with time. If anyone has, or wants to, put together a VM and have it show up on VMTN, give me a yell. Obviously, you do need Workstation or one of our server products to create VMs.

On a personal note, the Linux player has been my primary project for the last few months, so this one is near and dear to my heart. It’s been a lot of fun to work on and I hope you all take a chance to check it out; there are a lot of obvious comparisons with Acrobat Reader, but I hope that the player won’t provoke the sort of reviews that the latest version of Acrobat Reader did

For people paying attention to libview, the player is also a little bit of a showcase as it uses the Drawer, Tooltip and Spinner widgets.

Although the language hasn’t been finalised yet, do expect to see sane redistribution terms show up by the final release; this is actually a beta, even though the website seems to neglect to say so, which was a bit surprising.

Enjoy!

Edit: I’m getting a flood of comment spam on this post, so I’m disallowing comments to it. (2/2/06)