Developer Toolbox: VirtualBox

Wednesday 14 January 2009 - Filed under Code

Today I was on Twitter and someone mentioned installing Xen and I mentioned VirtualBox.  I still don’t think a lot of people know about it yet but they tried it and Twitted (?) me back that they had installed it.

Checking out VirtualBox now. Looks like it might be a little easier to configure.

I used to run VMWare but found the install was a bit of a pain (especially on Linux) and while it was nice I was never really blown away.  When I got my GPS and needed to run Windows on my Ubuntu machine I went looking around to see what else was available. I tried QEMU and a few others and finally stumbled upon VirtualBox (which has since been bought by Sun).

While I haven’t tried VMWare in quite awhile VirtualBox has lots of great features which I love:

• Simple install.  I’ve installed on both Windows (with a Linux guest) and on Linux (with a Windows guest) and never had any issues.
• There are a host of easily downloable images at the VirtualBox VDI Index. Want to try Ubuntu, Solaris or gOS? Grab and image and run it.
• Easily share folders between the guest and host – this makes moving files to and from my GPS a snap.
• Seamlessly run Windows inside your host OS.   You can even do this over RDP – a very cool video of that is available on YouTube.

If you haven’t yet checked out VirtualBox I’d certainly recommend giving it a try.

2009-01-14  »  Jim Priest