I must commend Microsoft for removing all barriers of entry to the Windows 8 Developer Preview - no signup, no msdn subscription required and best of all, no download manager activex control.

I wonder if it'll run in a VM. I'd like to try Windows 8 on my laptop without messing with partitions/dual booting.

I actually like the official answer: "We've seen it work, it should work, but it's not supported." Much better than "we can't comment, we don't support that."

edit: They seem to be collecting "pro tips" from users, so you are welcome to try any scenario and tell them about it, so they can tell other users.

According to a twitter answer, yes. At least with Virtual PC. (See reply to question by MrComputerRevo on http://twitter.com/#!/windevs )

Edit: Direct link: http://twitter.com/#!/windevs/status/113690827217313792 (Thank you, Simon.)

BTW: How do you link to a twitter conversation?

You click on the timestamp (e.g. "6 minutes ago")

the dev tools seem to be available for x64 only, and I'm pretty sure Virtual PC will only host a 32bit o/s?

in the other thread someone mentioned vmware panics when booting win8, but parallels works ok. I'm going to give virtualbox a shot

Got it up and running on a hyper-v VM in about 30minutes. Running great, but I can't figure out what the 'back' button equivalent is on the keyboard so that I can exit the App I'm in :)

edit: Turns out it's the windows key! I couldn't use it from the hyper-vm client, but once I remoted in via Remote Desktop it worked great. Loving the apps so far.

No problems running the 64-bit version in VirtualBox 4 on 64-bit Ubuntu Natty. Couldn't boot past splash screen in VMware Player.

No probs running from VirtualBox 4 on Win 7 either.

It looks _anyone_ can download the developer preview; I am looking forward to trying it!

As am I. I have an old extra C2D machine here currently running Ubuntu that I plan to reformat to Windows 8 (My laptop is my primary Linux machine these days). I'm looking forward to playing with the new dev tools.

Installed 32-bit version in VirtualBox. None of the Metro apps will start (could be related to lack of network access).

I've got the 32bit version and trying to get it to run in VB. It's installing right now...