Anyone know of any good VMWare equivalents? I've gone for the thirty-day trial, but I of course don't want to shell out $200 for a legit copy. In the spirit of keeping my system free (if not RMS-grade clean of proprietary software) and legal, any of yall know of any good VMWare replacements for Linux? "Use Bochs," would be a bad answer, but if anyone can point out a nice easy howto guide or easyfying shell for it, that would be awesome.

Such an equivalent (virtualization software) does not exist. The only thing that comes close is plex86 which was abandoned years ago. Bochs and QEmu are both emulation software and as such, will be slower.

EDIT: Maybe Xen might be what you're looking for. It won't run Windows though (it's not quite virtualization software).

you can try QEMU download here - it's opensource and should be way faster and easier to use than bosch. I haven't tried it yet but it looks like a really good piece of software.