This was posted earlier this week by Ars Technica, Wired and MacUser , but we wanted to note it to our readers as well.

Most people think of VMware Fusion as being the best way to run Windows on a Mac. But it’s important not to forget that VMware Fusion not only will let you run Windows 3.1 all the way through Windows Vista, but also more than 60  x86 operating systems as well. And that includes operating systems many people thought had already rode into the sunset!

Old school tech heads may remember BeOS, which many back in the day thought might ultimately replace Mac OS Classic as Apple’s operating system of choice. Well, when Apple went with NeXTSTEP, many thought BeOS was doomed to the scrapheap.

Well, BeOS is making a comeback, in the form of the Haiku project, an open source version of the operating system.

And if you have an interest in playing around with the newest open source version of what was once hailed as the successor to Mac OS Classic, you can certainly do just that, using VMware Fusion to run a pre-built virtual machine with Haiku already installed (zip file).

The people at Haiku have even made it easy for you, providing VMware-based virtual machines on their download page.

Go forth and geek out! 

And as a preview, here's a neat demo that the Haiku team pushed onto YouTube: