CrossOver Office is available in two versions, Standard and Professional. The Standard version is intended for home users and Linux enthusiasts, while Professional is more for commercial users and builds on the functionality of Standard by adding enhanced deployability features, as well as the ability to run CrossOver Office in shared mode from a single machine.

A 30-day trial of CrossOver Office is available from CodeWeavers and may be obtained from their web site (http://www.codeweavers.com/).

QEMU

QEMU is a generic open source processor emulator that was developed by Fabrice Bellard. It is available for free. QEMU allows a user to run one operating system, such as Windows, within another one, such as Linux.

QEMU is available for Free and may be downloaded from Fabrice's web site (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/download.html).

VMware

VMware comes from VMware, Inc., an EMC company. VMware allows users to to run multiple virtual machines on a single PC. Each virtual machine can run a different operating system. The net result is that VMWare allows a user to run multiple operating systems on a single Intel-based PC. Using VMware, a user can run a Windows virtual machine and Windows applications on a Linux PC.

VMware Workstation supports a long list of Linux distributions as the host operating system. You should check with the VMware web site for the specific releases and kernel levels supported.

A free 30-day trial of VMware Workstation may be downloaded from the VMWare web site (http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/eval.html.

VMware also provides the VMware Player for free. The VMware Player can run virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server. Pre-configured VMware virtual machines may be obtained from the VMWare Virtual Machine Center (http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/).

Win4Lin

Win4Lin from Win4Lin Inc. provides a Windows virtual computing environment that runs on Linux allowing Windows applications to run on Linux. Win4Lin comes in three versions that would be appropriate for the home user: