install a VMware player
VMware player homepage
download one of the following Linux systems:
Fedora (682 MB)
Ubuntu (698.4 MB)
Suse (679.3 MB)
Damn Small Linux (50.8 MB)
Puppy Linux (84 MB)
setup VMWare to communicate with Linux
You need to do this by downloading a file from Wolphination. After you download OS.zip extract its contents to your C: drive. You should now have C:\OS. Inside the OS folder I want you to put your version of Linux. So on my computer, inside C:\OS I have OS.VMX, OS.vmdk, and FC-6-i386-livecd-1.iso (this is shown above).
setup your VMWare configuration file.
open OS.VMX, and change the
ide1:0.fileName “C:\Your file”
to
C:\OS\FC-6-i386-livecd-1.iso
share files between Linux and Windows
Using Linux on Windows will be much more helpful if you can share files between Linux and Windows. This process is really easy to set up. The first thing you need to do is to create a “New Folder” on your Windows desktop. Right click on the folder and choose “Sharing and Security…”. On the following screen, choose “Share this folder on the network” and “Allow network users to change my files.” This will let Linux read and write to the folder.
In Linux, go to Places » Network Servers and you should see your computer. Double click on your computer and you will see all your shared folders. Any data you would like to be used in both Linux and Windows should be saved into this folder.
