arstechnica.com — Parallels and VMware are the two top contenders in the Mac virtualization game, but there's another virtualization package that you should know about: VirtualBox. Put out by Sun, VirtualBox is free, and in today's world that means something. So we took VirtualBox for a spin, to see how it stacks up against the non-free competition.
Jan 27, 2009 View in Crawl 4
theaceoffireJan 27, 2009
I had an issue with Seamless mode before, where if at least one window wasn't open then Compiz-fusion would start acting up. ^_^ Someone gave me a program that opened a 1px window in the upper right, and I set it to autostart with the virtual OS... a good work around. If anyone else has this issue, you can grab it here:<a class="user" href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=577897&amp;page=9">http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=577897&am ...</a>
godzilla8njJan 27, 2009
@ theaceoffireIt might be illegal for me to tell you to search PB for the mini Vista version, so I won't. *wink*
bytor4232Jan 27, 2009
Compiz-Fusion and VirtualBox do not play well together in seamless mode. I usually have to ALT-F2, metacity --replace before I try to go seamless.
cmostJan 27, 2009
I've been using VirtualBox on Linux since the 1.x releases and I think it works great! I used to use VMware and got tired of paying for it. I've not experienced any of the myriad problems this reviewer seems to be experiencing with the Mac version; perhaps it's just too new. Or, maybe the Mac version is just plain buggy. In any case, I can highly recommend VirtualBox 2.1.x to new Linux users who want to use Windows apps occasionally. The seamless mode is especially nice since it plunks the Windows taskbar across the bottom (or top) of the Linux desktop and Windows apps run side-by-side Linux's native apps. Even with full Compiz effects! Wonderful!
samanthasquaredJan 28, 2009
Thanks for this note, I am a web designer and I do often need to check how things look in IE, and was not willing to lay down the cash for other virtual machine hardware
Closed AccountJan 28, 2009
I love virtualbox. Having just one virtualization program for both Windows and Linux Hosts, with equal fuctionality is awesome. Also, they did add Win7 guest additions pretty fast (within a month), and USB support, while being tricky sometimes helped me plug my bluetooth adapter in the win7 beta where it worked out of the box (just like it always did in linux) to avoid Vista's messy driver problems. But I did run through a few bugs, such as not detecting the CD in my drive while my bluetooth usb adapter functionned, and couldnt boot with these, but overall its one of the best open source programs out there. (I hope Sun's recent layoffs wont hurt their awesome software development, because they are awesome contributors to the open-source software world)
joeljJan 28, 2009
Zero problems with either my Vista host or my Ubuntu host.I especially use VBox with my Ubuntu host quite a lot, and the only problem I've had was USB support.Sounds like the Mac version isn't as solid or something
dakrishtJan 31, 2009
I have installed Windows 7 on Fusion and am installing and testing Windows 7 on VirtualBox.VirtualBox is a solid VM solution although it doesn't compare with Enterprise-class bare-bone Hypervisors like ESXi and others...If you go to my site, I've written a detailed First Impressions, included Screenshots, Installation Guides, Bug Fixes and even an HD Video Tour of Windows 7...I also talk about Fusion, VirtualBox, Virtualization and much more...Running 10 OS atop a Sun Fire Server with over 20Ghz??? Believe, atomicsub is where you see it...That's a quality 5 minutes of your life well spent website people :-)Take care and visit www.AtomicSub.net for everything on Technology (or my DIGG profile takes you there too)