VirtualBox - Top of the Lot

[Ehtyar]

I understand why there has been no mention of VirtualBox around these parts yet - there are virtually (no pun intended) no good reviews of the product anywhere.

Fortunately, I found this rather comprehensive overview on Ars Technica. It's for Mac, but that doesn't particularly matter as VirtualBox is virtually (really, no pun intended) identical on every supported platform.

VirtualBox has been mentioned on DC in the past, but not since it became a real-world contender in the world of virtualisation. There are two threads here and here.

Personally, I would recommend VirtualBox above any other virtualisation solution available, paid or free.

Ehtyar.

[Gothi[c]]

Personally, I would recommend VirtualBox above any other virtualisation solution available, paid or free.

+1

[tinjaw]

Before seeing this post, I download and installed Virtual Box earlier today. Mostly because of so many mentions by people I follow on Twitter who use it. I hope I am as happy with it as they seem to be.

I found Microsoft's desktop offering to be lacking in features and VMware's free server to be adequate for my needs. I like the idea of Virtual Box being open source and supported by Sun.

[lanux128]

i'm thinking of using virtualbox inside window 7 to emulate the "winxp mode". how hard would that be?

[Eóin]

My instincts say not very hard but I don't have first hand experience with Win7 XP mode to compare just how seamlessly the XP applications sit on the Win7 desktop.

[justice]

i'm thinking of using virtualbox inside window 7 to emulate the "winxp mode". how hard would that be?

not possible AFAIK if you want it to the extend of having apps appear in your windows 7 start menu.

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

Recently I had a techie recommend using a VirtualBox solution for my Linux install rather than a dual-boot. (Which is planned for Real Soon Now -- as soon as I reinstall the XP that GParted crashed out on the play puter, for which I need to handle a bootmanager problem.)

A full OS in a virtualbox does seem odd to me, however I do like the reference here, how should I use the VirtualBox ?  Linux, test environment sandboxing, this and that ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery

[Eóin]

Good point justice, you do need a whole OS separately dedicated to the XP apps. My thinking is though once you've done that and have the XP os running then with features like shared clipboards, seamless windows, shared folders, etc the applications can talk to each other reasonably easily.

[f0dder]

Anybody got an idea how the XP mode in Win7 actually works? AFAIK it does contain an entire XP install that's run in the VM, but how are applications handled? Do they get installed in the VM image, or are they installed on your Win7 system and sorta box-wrapped into the XP-VM?

[mahesh2k]

VirtualBox, Nice Option. 

I found PortableUbuntu alternative to Wubi : http://portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar/ , i think even this app takes help of virtualization features as it reads partition on windows disk.

[lanux128]

i was thinking in parallel with how Microsoft implements the XP mode in Win 7, though i haven't tried it yet. (maybe over the weekend). currently one has to download Microsoft's Windows Virtual PC (beta) then download an image of WinXP and install both.

substituting Virtual PC with VirtualBox looks viable as the computer nowadays would have the juice to load a WinXP OS within Win7 to run a certain XP app without any compatibility problems. but as mentioned bu justice and Eóin earlier, the problem is to make a WinXP app "talk" to a Win7 seamlessly.

[Lashiec]

Anybody got an idea how the XP mode in Win7 actually works? AFAIK it does contain an entire XP install that's run in the VM, but how are applications handled? Do they get installed in the VM image, or are they installed on your Win7 system and sorta box-wrapped into the XP-VM?

For what I read, the applications get installed in the VM image, and shortcuts for the apps are created into a specific section of the Start menu of Windows 7.