Some things I’ve tried over the past week or so:
Getting Second Life to work on Linux (compiling from source). Well, it worked in a very limited way, after a fashion. I didn’t get any sound (had to compile without FMod because v3.75 isn’t downloadable for 64-bit Linux). And there were some graphics artifacts too. Linden Labs says that the Linux client is alpha. I don’t think it’s even there yet. Anyway, since I don’t really play Second Life (if you don’t fancy gambling or cybersex, there’s nothing to do) I’m not bothered.
VMWare Player. It’s nice. I like the concept a lot. And although it doesn’t give you any tools to create virtual machines, I soon discovered QEMU (for creating the disks with qemu-img) and EasyVMX. But VMWare doesn’t work that well with FreeDOS. Perhaps I’ll try breaking out the old MS-DOS 6.22 disks.
After some fiddling around with that, I gave up and went for DosBOX. Which plays things (old games) very nicely. With sound, even! I have now set up Eye of the Beholder 1 & 2 and also Sam & Max Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle. It’s all good. Now I just need to figure out a way to host those slightly younger games from the Win95/98 period, some of which use early forms of 3D acceleration. Roll on VMWare supporting 3D stuff.