Quote Originally Posted by whiteflags View Post
Well unfortunately most of the decent virtual machine products on the market (such as VMware and Parallels) are for the mac. At some point, a mac system is a reasonable investment for most people anyway, since the mac does some things well... and I recommend it since you are interested in mac programming. You can emulate the unix environments on a mac as well if that is a step you want to take.
I disagree - VMWare is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Xen is another option, available for Linux, as is KVM and several others. To be able to run Xen with Windows as a guest-OS or KVM (at all) you need to have a processor with virtualization extension, such as AMD Socket F or AM2 or better - and Intel has very similar features in their processors of similar age.

I think Parallels is the ONLY virtualization software that is directly written for MacOS.

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Mats