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besson3c · Sep 12, 2009, 11:02 PM

I just got a new Mac and decided to try out Virtualbox (I haven't for a while). I'm pretty impressed with it. It is quite fast, pretty user friendly, and seems to support most of the features that one would expect. It even has experimental direct 3D support, much like VMWare.

Do people gravitate towards VMWare and Parallels on the Mac simply because these products were sort of here first and hyped a fair bit, or am I missing something? Is there something lacking in Virtualbox that is present in one of these other products? The only thing I can see is Unity mode (and whatever the equivalent is in Parallels), although personally I can live without this feature.

AKcrab · Sep 12, 2009, 11:06 PM

I've had a hell of a time getting Virtualbox to recognize thumb drives and my optical drive. In fact, I've failed completely... I don't think I'm stupid, but I just can't get it to work.

I also can't seem to get folder "sharing" to work properly. Letting windows access a folder on the mac side.

besson3c · Sep 12, 2009, 11:09 PM

What version did you try? Version 3.0.6 was released just days ago, although I haven't looked at the release notes yet.

besson3c · Sep 12, 2009, 11:29 PM

I have noticed some weird screen refresh problems in Windows XP, although I haven't quite figured out how to reproduce them.

AKcrab · Sep 12, 2009, 11:36 PM

I don't think I've tried 3.06.. Recently I was 'forced' into "upgrading" to 10.6 server and that has impacted my ability to "mess around with stuff". I'm testing it with XP Pro.

There has been an issue with leaving the virtual session sleeping in the background; it won't wake up.

I'll try to revisit this thread on Monday when I'm actually at the machine running Virtualbox.

besson3c · Sep 12, 2009, 11:39 PM

Does VMWare for the Mac have those nasty clock sync issues that are prevalent in their other products?

besson3c · Sep 13, 2009, 12:19 AM

Does VMWare for the Mac have those nasty clock sync issues that are prevalent in their other products?

CharlesS · Sep 13, 2009, 12:58 AM

Well, it doesn't suffer from the dual post problem that is apparently evident in some other products.

besson3c · Sep 13, 2009, 01:14 AM

That was actually my fault, Charles... Look at the time stamps of those messages, and no, that is not a VMWare clock skew

CharlesS · Sep 13, 2009, 02:53 AM

The smiley didn't make it obvious enough?

besson3c · Sep 13, 2009, 02:57 AM

No, I'm a very serious guy. I'm surprised you haven't noticed this by now.

mduell · Sep 14, 2009, 07:42 PM

It's not nearly as mature as the other two, and while there is a Free version it's mostly useless (no USB, GigE, etc) compared to the paid version.

besson3c · Sep 14, 2009, 08:10 PM

mduell: I'm not sure what gives you that impression. The open source Virtualbox supports both USB and Gigabit ethernet. In fact, the default network adapter is a gigabit adapter and USB is enabled by default.

mduell · Sep 15, 2009, 12:18 AM

It looks like perhaps they've made GigE and iSCSI available, but USB is clearly excluded from the Free edition.

besson3c · Sep 15, 2009, 12:55 AM

It also says:

The following list shows the enterprise features that are only present in the closed-source edition. Note that this list may change over time as some of these features will eventually be made available with the open-source version as well.

This information must be outdated and they must have moved USB to the open source edition. Download it and see for yourself.

TheoCryst · Sep 15, 2009, 01:37 AM

I can second that USB is available in VirtualBox, and has been for a decent time. I used it last spring with an Ubuntu guest to do some GNUstep development, and I frequently used a USB stick for inter-OS file transfers.