This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.

Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X
release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major
release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating
system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation
software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q

Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a
universal binary, which means that it will provide near native
performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like
Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo
Linux as it doesn’t need to translate all the
CPU operations to a foreign architecture.

Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image
from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a
harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work
perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked
myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I’m not missing a single application that I had used before on
win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own
application if I’ll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.