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.
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[...] even have a Windows bar at the bottom and a Linux bar on the top, if you use Virtual Box and run in seamless mode. Oh yes, Virtual box is also free. So is VM Server from [...]
[...] for anything on a Mac, I thought I’d give open source, i.e. VirtualBox another try (see my previous post) and look it works perfectly. Version 1.6 now officially supports Mac OS X and it’s [...]