Has anyone tried ORACLE VM VIRTUALBOX?

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Level 1

11 points

Has anyone tried ORACLE VM VIRTUALBOX?

I have just come across this application after I downloaded "Open Office" from Oracle, a free Office Suite. I sounds like this "VirtualBox" is like parallel desktops, but for many diffeent OS's besides Windows. Here is the website: http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/oraclevm/061976.html

DESCRIPTION:
MORE ABOUT ORACLE VM VIRTUALBOX
Multiple operating systems on one desktop
Cross-platform guests and hosts including Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris, and Mac OS X as a host
Teleportation of running virtual machines between hosts without interruption
High performance
Support for massive workloads of up to 32 virtual CPUs
OVF format support

macBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4), iOS4 [iphone], iOS3g iPad, Vista on bootcamp

Posted on Sep 24, 2010 5:57 AM

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Answer 1

Fortuny

Level 7

21,461 points

Sep 24, 2010 6:11 AM in response to Damien 7777

Hi,

VirtualBox has been around for quite some time from Suns Microsystems which Oracle took over lately.

It's a very good alternative to Parallels or VMWare Fusion (which btw. also support other Operating Sytems than Windows).

VirtualBox lacks some 'refinements' of the other two, such as 3D graphics support for playing Windows games and the like.

But other than that it is a good and non-expensive alternative to the other commercial Virtualization apps.

Regards

Stefan

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Sep 24, 2010 6:33 AM in response to Damien 7777

VM Virtualbox has been available for several years now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox

and I've used it myself in the past to run Ubuntu Linux. It works fine.

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Answer 3

Sep 24, 2010 9:26 AM in response to Damien 7777

As others have said, it has been around for years. I used it to run Windows XP in both Tiger and Leopard, but when I upgraded to Snow Leopard the then current version of Virtual Box was not ready for the new Mac system, so I never installed it.

It worked fine, once it got set-up properly, but setting it up was not exactly easy. Like many open source applications it was a bit non-intuitive for a Mac user, and the directions were not particularly clear. I believe it took several weeks before everything was working the way I wanted (to be fair, I did want to set it up in a slightly non-standard way).
Francine

Francine
Schwieder

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Answer 4

a brody

Level 10

85,314 points

Sep 24, 2010 1:07 PM in response to Damien 7777

Sorry for hijacking this thread, but anybody know how to setup VirtualBox to do screen spanning? That means have one Windows desktop across two screens? I can set it up for one or the other but not both for some reason. I'm using XP SP3 on 10.6.2. Or is this another of the features Parallels, VMWare, or Boot Camp has better support for?

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