Virtualisation doesn't have to be scary. It isn't the sole
domain of the enterprise, or cloud computing, or server farms.
It's just as useful, and just as manageable, as the average
desktop, and there now seem to be almost as many ways to
virtualise Linux as their are distributions themselves.  You
could pay money, for example, and buy a workstation product from
either VMware or Parallels, both of which have excellent
performance, support and some advanced features. Or you could
try their open source equivalents, the wonderful VirtualBox and
Qemu.  But there's another alternative, and it can offer the
most transparent virtualisation integration into your current
configuration, making it an ideal way to experiment with new
distributions, and put them to the test.  This is KVM, the
kernel-based virtual machine. These three letters might once
have scared you off with stories of complexity and VNC sessions,
but thanks to a wonderful Red Hat project called Virt-Manager,
almost anyone with the right hardware can in