What is VirtualBox?
Sun’s VirtalBox is a virtualisation application similar to VMware workstation that allows you to run an operating system inside a virtual environment. So you can run a virtual instance of Linux on your windows desktop, which is great for development or maybe you just want to experiment with a new operating system without risk of wiping your main OS.
What makes VirtualBox different from VMware?
1. It’s Free
What more can I say? You can’t beat free, and the only other comparable free virtualisation software is VMware server which is quite good, but not ideal for the desktop, VMware player which lacks the fancy control panel, QEMU which I have not used for a while but was slightly complicated to set up, and Virtual PC which is just OK.
2. Seamless desktop integeration
Imagine running Windows XP and Linux applications side-by-side on your desktop! Well, that’s what they are aiming for and I think it’s a fantastic idea but not quite there yet. The basic idea is that the desktop of the guest OS is transparent and the taskbar is placed on top of the host OS. On a windows host, you must have the guest OS taskbar on the bottom, which is not that great, ideally you would want windows at the bottom and the guest OS taskbar at the top. This doesn’t work because all of the windows in your guest OS are treated as one window in your taskbar. i.e. You’re just running virtualbox, but with an invisible desktop background, but it’s resized itself to sit above your windows taskbar.
I’ve seen screenshots of people running Gnome on a Ubuntu host, and windows as a guest with one taskbar on the top and one on bottom of the screen, a Linux host probably provides more flexibility.
Virtualbox seamless desktop (obligatory random piece of code and lots of windows)
3. Mouse Integration
With VMware you must activate the guest window before the mouse and keyboard inputs are registered, virtualbox can automatically grab the mouse when you move over the guest desktop and will release when you move off the virtualbox window. This feature can also be disabled if you prefer. This feature really makes it effortless to use two operating systems side-by-side.
4. Auto resize of the guest display.
To resize your Guest desktop, you merely resize your virtualbox window on the host, and the guest display is resized automatically. A great idea, because sometimes you don’t want to run fullscreen on your guest OS, and having to scroll to reach the taskbar gets annoying, you can instantly set the desktop to the size you want.
Here’s a screenshot of a mini desktop:
Virtualbox Mandriva desktop
Summary
From using it, I’ve noticed that it is much faster at resuming a paused machine than VMware is, it’s just as easy to use as VMware workstation, has most of the features you need, it supports intel-VT but does not support SMP. Overall, this is a great piece of software.
