Medium level pc for learning o/s's

[steves85]

Hi,
After succesfully completing my first computer some months ago ive decided to study IT and move into the field hopefully owning my own business one day.(thats another story)

Im wanting to build a computer now that i can install windows,linux and o/s X on to get some experience up. I need to know is this in fact possible, i have seen guides on youtube about partitioning the drive to have an option at startup between windows and ubuntu. I have also read you can run o/s X by virtual drive ??? not to sure about this.

Anyway i dont want to spend big bucks on this machine, and wont be buying a monitor for it. Budget is about $400 - $500

Any ideas/suggestions welcome.

 

[NoNameNY]

Don't bother with dual or triple booting, you can set it up as a virtual box. Check out Sun Virtual Box

 

[steves85]

At a quick glance that program looks very impressive. Is a powerful computer needed to run this program smoothly with say 5 or 6 o/s's installed in virtualbox?

Do you need to obtain discs for each o/s or are they all available for iso mounting?

 

[kmote]

You do need a fairly powerful computer to run virtual machines but you don't need to be running them all at the same time. To run OSX legally (discussions about running it illegally are against our rules) you need Apple hardware although this restriction may not apply to the server versions, I'm not sure.

EDIT: I have checked the EULA and Apple have been extremely clear that it can only be run on an Apple branded computer. That goes for the server version as well.

 

[NoNameNY]

Since you can not legally run OSX virtually I would suggest picking up a second hand Mac and play with it that way. But the various *nix flavors can be run virtually

 

[steves85]

How much is a second hand mac roughly? Is it legal to run iso's of other o/s such as windows vista and linux. If so are there any sites that feature these for download or must i purchase a retail copy?