Virtual Box.

Virtual Box is a free open source virtualization package.
http://www.virtualbox.org/

It installed easily, configuration was a snap. It works as advertised. I've been wanting to get back into Linux, and this was my chance. I'm still learning. One problem is full screen. It takes over the screen, but the window as you see above stays the same size. I will probably have to read the manual some day.

As a computer science prof I once knew used to say, if that don't turn ya on, you just ain't got a switch.

I've never messed with virtualization 'cause I didn't want to deal with VMWare. And I thought to myself about this, "Oh, I'll never be able to work through the bugs of this mess.

But here I sit. I've entered some kind of bizarre vortex of computer. I've got my Linux box with a Windows XP machine running inside it ... and running well.

I'll now boot my Windows partition even less frequently. I have to use PowerPoint and Word occasionally for work-related stuff, and that all works perfectly with this.

Damn. Just ... damn.

Thanks for giving me the inspiration to try it.

I think that has something to do with the pitiful graphics card in the Mac Mini. That's the only gripe I have with it. So far.


I do like the price.

Oh, and they have one of my old, all time favorite games: Kfoul Eggs. Smiletris is fun too.

I also found that Opera works better than Firefox. If I try to go home to my portal by typing it in, it downloads the source to the desktop and doesn't go to the page. Opera doesn't do that. It works as it should.

Since you're running a Linux guest in a Mac host, I'm sure little of this applies, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

Display resolution was the first thing I fought with. Upon initial install of Windows XP as a guest, it gave me the 800x600 resolution, which I just can't deal with at all. Using 16MB of video memory, I was able to change that via the standard Windows method up to 1024x768, but I could go no further. Still a bit small for my tastes since I'm accustomed to 1600x1200. I then read some of the manual, and it suggested I needed to install the VirtualBoxGuestAdditions.

Well, that didn't seem to be anywhere.

I then discovered I had installed an older version of VirtualBox (1.56 via apt-get) that didn't have this. So, I uninstalled that and downloaded the 1.62 (latest) from Sun's website. From there, I booted the virtual machine and found I suddenly had new resolutions available to me already (up to 1280x1024), and the guest additions ISO was available to mount as a virtual CD/DVD, and I installed that as well. It improved performance some.

The two things I got out of this initially were that a) the latest version of VirtualBox has more features and b) the guest additions stuff improves performance of various things similar to how a driver for certain kinds of hardware would.

I've had issues with older versions with my network / internet not working and taking all day to find a fix for it.

... everything has improved dramatically. The one I'm commenting on in the previous message was, what, 1.56.

They are up to version 2.2 now. They've done a lot of development.

I had had some problems with the network as well. When I was first playing with it and just installing everything I had to see how it functioned, I had three different versions of XP and Vista. The XP guests worked fine with the exception of one not recognizing the default sound setup. I changed it to one of the other settings, and it worked.

But the Vista installation had several problems, one of which was the network. I finally mucked around with it enough to get it to work. I'm not even sure how. I just kept changing things until it finally did what it was supposed to do, a hack and slash approach to problem solving.

The latest versions seem to have far fewer issues of this variety.

...and it absolutely works every bit as good as VMWare for what I need. I like to try different distros, as well as run XP for the 1 app I need that hasn't been ported over yet. Very nice product indeed!