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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Alternative Operating Systems > Virtualbox - Anyone tinker w/ this yet?

Virtualbox - Anyone tinker w/ this yet?
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cmeisenzahl
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Jul 10, 2008, 11:25 AM
 
Looks interesting.

1 Free Program to Run Windows on your Mac | MakeUseOf.com
"Virtualization seems to be one of the great buzzwords these days. Everyone wants to be running an operating system other than their own. My first experience with this sort of thing was trying to run Linux alongside Windows XP using VMware. My second was with Parallels, running XP on my Mac."
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/virtual...-free-sort-of/

VirtualBox
"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 General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris 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/
     
MacosNerd
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Jul 10, 2008, 11:31 AM
 
check in the alternative OS forum. I suspect a few people have
     
benville
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Jul 10, 2008, 01:11 PM
 
the virtualbox looks interesting. i think i'll check it out when my brain is in gear and i've had my java.
     
seanc
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Jul 10, 2008, 03:53 PM
 
I've been using Virtual Box exclusively 24/7 for the past year and a bit. Excellent piece of software, kicks the pants off of Virtual PC (the Windows version).

Haven't used it much on my MacBook because the fan starts screaming and it wasn't very Leopard compatible at the time.
     
powerbook867
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Jul 11, 2008, 08:20 PM
 
How does it compare to Fusion? Can anyone give some feedback who have used both?
Joe
     
angelmb
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Jul 12, 2008, 09:16 AM
 
My concern is XP itself, lately it goes nuts when dealing with USB adaptors to read-write to Kingston SD cards, this under VMware Fusion. Would be Virtualbox -a less mature product- worth a try?
     
besson3c
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Jul 12, 2008, 01:02 PM
 
Virtualbox is great, although last I tried it the Mac version was pretty unstable. On Linux it is faster than VMWare for me.

What would be nice would be KVM + libvirt support for OS X. Both Virtualbox and KVM are based on Qemu, although KVM provides full virtualization support via hardware, and libvirt provides a great interface for managing virtual machines, allocating resources to them via the command line, autostart at boot, cloning domains, etc.
     
The Godfather
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Jul 13, 2008, 11:35 PM
 
I swear by it, in a Linux environment. I use it everyday to do test runs of software installations. I love the snapshots feature (Fusion does not have it)

I have only used it once under OSX. It doesn't support the Bootcamp partition, but if you don't need that, you should definitely give it a try. No complaints from me in the performance department (in my 1 use of VB for Mac).

The product was bought by Sun. Soon after the acquisition, the Mac version got updated with fixes and a few more features. Cross your fingers so that Sun keeps up with the development of this amazing Open Source project.

If you don't want to install it, at least you should read the manual. It gives great insight of all the things it can do.
     
besson3c
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Jul 14, 2008, 12:41 AM
 
The snapshots feature is actually a feature provided by the qcow2 disk image format, which is the default Virtualbox (as well as Qemu, KVM, and Q) disk image format. VMWare uses the vmdk disk image format. If there was ever a way to get VMWare to read qcow images, you could do snapshots even if VMWare/Parallels did not provide a GUI for this.

Has Sun made it easier to setup bridged (host only) networking, or is NAT still the default?
     
   
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