Virtual Environments on MBP

Ill be starting back in school on Monday. Taking Logic & Problem Solving (programming) and a course concentrating on Linux.

What program can I use to do that. Do I need an external hard drive? I currently don't have one.

Give Virtual Box a try. And yes, you can use it with an external (but it's not recommended for performance reasons). If your thought was to use an external to keep the partition separate from your Mac, be aware that virtualization products create a virtual hard disk in a single file. So, there's no modification to your existing partition structure.

Can I use it *without* an external?
Thx for link.

Of course.

Absolutely. I have 5 virtual machines right now (soon to be 6) and all of the virtual hard drives, contained in a single file as cwa107 mentioned, are in ~/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/. For instance, my entire Gentoo VM is contained in one file named Gentoo.vdi weighing in at 4.6GB.

EDIT: Will VMware *fusion* work ?

I need an external to do my work. There are PC's available to use at my school. Just thought i'd give it a testy on the Mac.