Hair & Nail Deli Salad *yum*

I walk by this every day, but I finally snapped a picture. Feel like eating some hair and nail in your salad?

Virtual Box

On the note of awesome pieces of software. My work laptop died on a work-from-home-day, so I “had to make due” with my home Linux server (just a dual core with 8G of RAM running CentOS 5.1/64).

After configuring what had been a headless server with a few VMWare Server virtual machines to be a full desktop environment, I decided to give Virtual Box, the open source virtualization solution from Innotek (which was just acquired by Sun) a try.

Compatibility

VirtualBox runs Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts. OpenSolaris! I’ve wanted to set up a fat Solaris box at home but always shied back because of the lack of virtualization. I still won’t do it now and my little Ultra 5 will continue to collect dust in the corner. But I could!

Installation

Just download the installer (RPM in my case) from the web site and start it up. Unlike VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox runs alongside VMWare Server just fine.

Creating a new VM and installing Windows XP in it was just as easy as it is in VMWare. Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions in the guest operating system will install the correct graphics and mouse drivers for seamless operation.

Seamless Mode

The fanciest part is the seamless mode which blends the virtual Windows instance directly into the Linux UI (it really looks just like Parallels on a Mac).

Conclusion

What an awesome piece of open source software. This will be my first choice from now on under Linux.