Plex86 is a project to create a virtual machine for the x86 architecture that runs Linux operating system. The machine runs only Linux because, according to the creator, it makes the architecture of the machine "the order of 10x or 100x more simplistic."
In the past there has been some confusion as to the main goal of Plex86 - starting out as a being basically a stripped-down version of Bochs. Plex86 has many attributes in common with Bochs, except that where bochs attempts to emulate almost the whole system (which takes considerably more system resources,) Plex86 only emulates the parts of the system that it absolutely has to, in order to be able to run a Linux operating system. As such, it will only "emulate" a computer with an intel-based (368+) processor, and will only run on the Linux OS, probably because with Linux, programmers have easier access to the hardware devices.
The software is currently only in its alpha stages. It only moved to its current site on Sourceforge early in 2003 - previous to that, it had been hosted elsewhere. It is uncertain as to the activity of this project, as the last news article on their main page, which was asking for donations to help keep the project alive, is dated 19th December 2003.
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