VirtualBox: VM software for home and enterprise use

[KenR]

New Open Source Virtual PC Tool

InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction; see "InnoTek" for more about our company.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows and Linux 32-bit hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD...

http://www.virtualbox.org/

from http://www.all4you.d....php?action=newlinks

[f0dder]

Lots of virtualization software seems to be popping up (semi-) lately... wonder how good this is, might be worth checking out.

[masu]

thanks for the hint

[Crush]

Today VirtualBox has become an update to version 1.3.4!

[nudone]

donationcoder generously donated vmware to me many moons ago but i uninstalled recently whilst messing around with my computer.

so, i thought i'd try out 'virtualbox' before putting vmware back on.

i've just put xp into, updated and tried out internet explorer 7. everything seems to work fine. it looks like it will do what vmware will do after you make the right changes - like with networking. currently, the sound isn't working - this did work with vmware straight away so at the moment vmware seems better for me.

but virtualbox is free and it looks like you can run vista inside it, not sure if you can with vmware at the moment. doesn't look like you can run any apple operating systems with it - unlike vmware.

i'll keep it on for a while and see what happens.

edit:
yeah, stupid me. i didn't enable the sound correctly, it works fine now.

[Crush]

At the VirtualBox HP they have screenshots with Vista running.

[MerleOne]

Can you "clone" your current system into a VirtualBox system, so you don't have to reinstall everything ?

Thanks !

[mwb1100]

Can you "clone" your current system into a VirtualBox system, so you don't have to reinstall everything ?

-MerleOne (February 14, 2007, 02:30 PM)

I don't know if VirtualBox has a specific tool for this, but one way to perform a physical to virtual clone is to use something like Ghost or another appropriate tool to copy the drive form the physical machine to the virtual machine.

In other words, pretend you got a new system from Dell (or whomever).  How would you get your existing computer's stuff on to the new machine?  Do something similar for the VM.

You may have to image your physical drive to a file then 'restore' the image to the VM in order to work around the fact that the VM will be running on the physical machine.  Also, you'll generally have to deal with re-activating any installed software that's tied the hardware signature (like WinXP, Office XP, etc.).

[MerleOne]

Thanks.  The problem of software license is indeed to take into account, I wouldn't want to have some software disabled on the "real" PC because the Publisher has detected another use with the same license on the virtual PC.

The best way is probably to install a fresh system...