Basically my problem is this: I have an academic who is running win2k. He also has just purchased a scientific program that runs in linux. However he also does not want to have to dual-boot or purchase anthing more. Thinking along these lines as far as both he and I could remember, mandrake allowed you to create an image that you could load to from within windows and was doing a lot of marketing on this ability a while back. I haven't seen anything more about this on their site, so I don't know about this anymore. In the end I just need to know if it can be done with any of the distros rather than a VM of some sort. Cheers... david -----Original Message----- From: mglb1-forwarding Sent: Friday, 26 September 2003 12:51 pm If you want a real virtual machine that allows you to install anything you might want to look at something like VMware. It's not free in any sense of the word but it works really well and allows you to play with a lot more than just linux. You can download a 30 day evaluation copy from their website.