OT: Virtual OSes

[Fairlight]

I've known about VMWare for ages.  I've even been using DOSBox for some
retro gaming.

I was just looking into Joomla! the other day, and through looking at
something they did, I found out about a project Sun did that I guess I sort
of previously missed.  It's called VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org).

It's virtualisation.  In short--run guest OSes from your current one.
They've got binaries for all the big host OSes.

I've used Microsoft's Hyper-V, and I have to say that (unsurprisingly) I'm
much happier with Sun's take on it than MS's overly-complex attempt that
does a lot poorer job at some things given the complexity.  (Do -not- get
me started on their keyboard and mouse handling under Hyper-V with linux.)

Pretty much it was as simple as download and install VirtualBox, download
the DVD ISO for OpenSuSE 11.1, and do the normal installation of SuSE
inside VirtualBox.  It went flawlessly, and I now have SuSE 11.1 running
under WinXP whenever I want it.

I used to dual boot, years back.  I stopped because I'm a heavy gamer (as
many of you know), and games for linux never really took off properly.  I
was spending so much time in Windows that I just stopped booting linux
entirely, preferring to use remote, and then in-house headless systems for
separate linux use.  The Cobalt Qube that I'd maintained in-house has HD
issues, and was dodgy at best to attempt updating to a modern linux dist
due to some limitations inherent in the firmware.  So that's been down for
a while.

Now I basically get to do all my gaming and usual desktop/multimedia/whatever 
on WinXP, but get to run a proper linux development system on-demand,
without rebooting at all.

About the only bad thing I have to say about VirtualBox thus far -isn't-
even Sun's fault--it's Microsoft's.  Just keep clicking "Continue" when you
get about 8+ boxes warning about unsigned this and unsigned that.  It all
works just fine (straight down to the networking--which required -zero-
configuration and even properly grabbed my nameserver configs).  So you get
some warnings/confirmations, but it's Windows that generates them, not VB.
And only during install.

Can't say enough good things about this setup.  And since it works off of
virtual hard drive images, you can add as many distributions as you like to
test drive, compare, use, whatever.  And the dynamically resising ones are
great.  It's also NOT limited to linux.  You can run BSD, linux, Solaris,
Windows, OS/2, or "Other".  Hmmm.  Wonder if you can get OS/X running on
Windows. :)

Anyway...it solves a bunch of logistical problems for me, including my old
linux dev box being headless.  If you have the need (or just like to putz
around), give it a shot.  As near as I can tell, it's all good.

mark->