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Personally, I prefer VirtualBox. It has all the features you expect of a professional VM (rootless desktop, 3D acceleration, drive passthrough, etc.) but is available for the low-low price of $0.

The situation looks a bit different if you're going to use it for business purposes, but for home use there is no better option than VirtualBox.

As of 2.0.2 release there was no support for SMP. Possible in the future though: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=1176

Download a free XP vmware image from the ususal places and run it on Vbox http://www.virtualbox.org/ under Linux - should work...

Aren't they (M$oft) asking for it?

The virtualbox additions do not work well yet.

I had to mask the programs as Windows Vista to even install and when I tried to reboot, I am stuck with a screen telling me that windows is starting (until it times out and shuts down.)

I am not saying that is window 7's fault since the drivers are not made for it. This is more a heads up to anyone trying.

Of course, others have had better luck

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=13124

VirtualBox. They even added (experimental) hardware video acceleration to the latest release.

How about OpenSolaris for Christ's sake?

I'd add VirtualBox (virtualization software for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris/OpenSolaris) as another Sun free and open source product that's more deserving than at least a few of the products mentioned in TFA. Version 2.1 now has OpenGL support, hardware support for Intel VT-x and AMD-V, 64-bit guests in 32-bit hosts, and other features/fixes.

Maybe TFAuthor has difficulty thinking anything from Sun can be "open source."

How about OpenSolaris for Christ's sake?

I'd add VirtualBox (virtualization software for Windows, OS X, Linux, and Solaris/OpenSolaris) as another Sun free and open source product that's more deserving than at least a few of the products mentioned in TFA. Version 2.1 now has OpenGL support, hardware support for Intel VT-x and AMD-V, 64-bit guests in 32-bit hosts, and other features/fixes.

Maybe TFAuthor has difficulty thinking anything from Sun can be "open source."

It's a known issue. Try to build world, or portsnap update and you are likely to see it. The bug was filed against 1.6 and was still reproducable with 2.0.6. I can't produce it on 2.1, because now my FreeBSD VM aborts during the boot process (as in, the VM aborts, not the OS - the window disappears and the VirtualBox GUI reports the VM state as 'aborted'). This is with an OS X (Core 2 Duo) host, but the eflags bug has also been reproduced on Linux.

VirtualBox can have the same kind of new kernel issues as VMWare. I went over tracking one of those down my blog (and this month went over working around the limitations in VirtualBox that prevent you from cloning a snapshot image).

I've found the stuff that VirtualBox has issues with straighforward to work around for the usual reason that makes open-source software easier to cope with: when I do run into a bug or limitation, it's sometimes possible to poke at the source code to figure out what's going on. In that snapshot cloning case, a quick read of CloneToImage and its associated code gave me a decent idea what was going on. That's why I run it instead of VMWare player: given anything close to feature parity, I'll take a slightly buggy program I can see the source code to over one that's closed.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Virtualization

Check this out, it is not a emulator.

Not sure why this wasn't mentioned.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.

I think the article/download site may disagree with you, and I believe that VMWare and VirtualBox would also disagree.

FTA...

"1. Download the Native Client distribution for your development platform: Linux, Mac, or Windows."

Secure or not, it goes against the main founding principle of the web, which is portability.

How is this going against the principles? Having the same code, run on multiple platforms I would have sworn is the definition of portability...

All this is, is virtualization ported to the browsers - why wouldn't this be a good/cool thing?

This won't solve everything, but as a tip to other readers who aren't having this many problems, using "ssh -XC" can greatly help over slow links. The capital C turns on compression. Ages ago, SSHing from work to home (home is DSL, 256k up), launching Bluefish dropped from 30 seconds to 10.

Alternately, if the performance of the Linux box isn't especially crucial, maybe the solution to all your problems is to RDC to a Windows box running Linux in a VM. :-) VirtualBox is free now.

Personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother). It doesn't matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it. Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use.

I like those terms;-)

Since it's a dev environment, check out Virtual box.

The post above has already highlighted some advantages, so this is just to point out how easy it is to try out.

Just download the OpenSolaris ISO (the last one was 2008.05, with 2008.11 imminent): OpenSolaris

If you're a little masochistic, try running it as a live CD.

A better way is to download VirtualBox (another Sun open-source product, although there is a more-complete non-open-source version that is also free (of charge)): VirtualBox
Just install OpenSolaris as a guest OS and try it - no need to re-partition or dual-boot, and no problems with unsupported PC hardware either.

Of course, you'll be limited in your ability to try out some of its more advanced features with this approach, but for just trying it out and kicking the tyres a bit, it's very simple.

Dual boot is for people with commitment issues. It's not worth the hassle, nor the Doubt of knowing if the second install is going to hash the first. If you need both, buy another PC or install one in a VM. It's not like a good Linux box costs more than $220 and virtualbox is free.

But pen boot is cool. The version of Ubuntu that does it is only a couple days old. I haven't tried it yet. Maybe tomorrow. I'm pretty hot about it. I pen boot Clonezilla at work a couple hundred times a day. It's slick.

So in conclusion, if you want the latest and greatest free software then I highly recommend that you try Ubuntu 8.10, it works fabulously for me. If you want a super stable free software OS then use 8.04.1.

Wake me when you can run VMware or VirtualBox under BSD. Until then, it's useless to me.

The source is available for VirtualBox's "OSE" version. If someone felt so inclined, they could port the *BSD-specific bits to work. I'm assuming the major work would be in the kernel module, but if you want it done badly enough, you could do it.

Not bad, if you have Windows and IE. Does browser ID-spoofing work?

No, but this does the trick. ;)

Although I appreciate that I'm likely missing the point, isn't the fact that OS/2 already well supported on VirtualBox good enough? Isn't it sufficient for your application needs to run it as a guest on a Linux or Windows host?

What's the motivation?

VirtualBox runs nicely on MacBooks. (Posted Anon since I've already moderated the hell out of this thread.)

As far as I understood it, VirtualBox does support USB in the binary distribution you can download here. VirtualBox's "Open Source Edition (OSE)" doesn't support USB, see here. But if you're running VMWare Player (a closed-source product) anyway, the non-Free/Open aspect of it must not be a hangup for you (nor is it for me). So what's your holdup for running the "closed" distribution of VirtualBox. You'd have USB and, unlike VMware Player, could actually create new virtual machines.

As far as I understood it, VirtualBox does support USB in the binary distribution you can download here. VirtualBox's "Open Source Edition (OSE)" doesn't support USB, see here. But if you're running VMWare Player (a closed-source product) anyway, the non-Free/Open aspect of it must not be a hangup for you (nor is it for me). So what's your holdup for running the "closed" distribution of VirtualBox. You'd have USB and, unlike VMware Player, could actually create new virtual machines.

I rip the whole disc to the HDD via AnyDVD HD in a Windows XP VirtualBox envrionment.

I then just delete all files (.m2ts or what-have-you) except the largest file (generally 20GB or so) and play in an SVN build of Mplayer.

All is well on my end. AnyDVD HD can take every disc I've thrown at it so far.

If I'm not mistaken, the source you are provided does not provide every feature found in the pre-built binaries. See http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions#Closed-sourcefeatures for more details.

So you're not just paying for the convenience of having somebody compile it for you...

From the Virtual Box Licensing FAQ

Personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother). It doesn't matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it. Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would not qualify as personal use. Well, you could ask each of your 500 employees to install VirtualBox but don't you think we deserve some money in this case? We'd even assist you with any issue you might have.

So you can use it personally in a corporation for O/S testing, image development and more! Seems pretty fair to me.

This is not quite correct - in the FAQ they state that you can use it on work machines and still have it count as personal use (even if it is used for buisiness purposes). However, if you make an install image and roll out to 1000 users, that would count as an enterprise install. See Virtual Box FAQ, point 6.

Overall, I think this is quite a fair license and restriction.

Cheers

VirtualBox's greatest failing is that in using QEMU's I/O and networking code, they've made it a royal pain to set up bridged-mode networking on Linux hosts. You get to write two scripts, to add and remove a TAP device from a host-side bridge, and get to set up said bridge on the host yourself. Not only this, since the 2.6.18 kernel you need to run VirtualBox VMs as root (or set up sudo with /etc/sudoers not to prompt for a password and use it within your scripts), because only the superuser can manipulate the TAP/TUN devices; chmodding them writable by a particular privileged group is insufficient.

Compare to VMware, which handles all the bridging etc. by itself—much more convenient to use.

Then there are VirtualBox's "Guru meditations", obscure ERROR_MESSAGES_THAT_LOOK_LIKE_THIS and provide minimal information, often requiring perusal of the source code to figure out what's wrong. This is entirely unsuitable for end users as well as people whose time is valuable.

Finally, I tend to run a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace. VirtualBox does not support this combination—it's either 32-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace or 64-bit kernel with 64-bit userspace. (VMware on the other hand does support 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace; its failing is that [as far as I know] there is no non-beta 64-bit userspace for VMware yet, though this will change with the release of VMware Server 2.0 and VMware Workstation 6.5.) This is only really a problem on Debian and Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu, whose package manager (dpkg) is too incompetent to handle multiarch properly, despite work ongoing for about four years now, so the user has to set up a 64-bit chroot environment. (Fedora, RHEL and CentOS get this right; rpm can handle multiarch properly, so it's only a matter of installing the appropriate libraries there.)

VMware also supports 64-bit guests on certain processors. VirtualBox doesn't support 64-bit guests at all.

So in my view, between the two, VMware still wins, open source or no open source.

VirtualBox has some issues with FreeBSD.

I tried to install a recent release of FreeBSD which ended up in frequent hangs related to the network adapter.

Changing the network adapter type seems to fix the problem.

I binded my Winkeys for K's Start Menu in the past, but it caused problems with VirtualBox with Windows XP Pro. SP2 guest. KDE and it fought. One time, it made my X not respond correctly. Killing failed to fix it. I had to reboot Linux/Debian. :(

I had no problems with VMware Workstation v5 with Windows 2000 SP4 guest.

Has anyone had this problem before or know how to fix it?

Or better, use VMware, VirtualBox, dual boot, etc. Clean and easier to maintain.

If it ran under Win98 you will probably get decent performance out of a virtualized Win98 in VirtualBox.

Their big mistake has been ignoring commodity hardware

Similarly, the primary focus of the Java codebase is the x86 platform first, remaining platforms later.

Sun is also a massive seller of AMD64 and Intel Xeon based servers and workstations. Amazingly, Sun's prices have even come out of the stratosphere and are extremely competitive with other manufacturers like Dell.

Sun is even working to virtualize these "commodity platforms" with their surprisingly good OpenxVM project. I actually passed on a free copy of Parallels because Sun's VirtualBox was working so well for me.

I know Sun has the stigma of selling only overpriced iron, but the truth is that they're fairly well in tune with their customers and are working hard to provide them with the products and services they need. Along the way, the Open Source community is benefiting greatly.

From what I understand, you can do all of that stuff with VirtualBox (virtual machine), DOSBox (x86 emulator w/ DOS) and Wine (cross-platform implementation of the Windows API).

DOSBox takes care of basically every vintage game I've ever played and even though VirtualBox needs Windows installed in the virtual machine, it has a 'seamless' mode that allows you to have the Windows apps running 'outside' of the virtual machine. That's a sucky explanation and it'd be easier to explain if I had a pencil and paper.

Wine recently reached version 1.0 and, as I believe a sibling post pointed out, it should be able to run Photoshop perfectly well. The open source Windows project you mentioned, ReactOS, shares some of its code with Wine (which is how the two projects have managed to make some great advances in certain areas), so there's a nice little tie-in.

ReactOS is currently at about version 0.3.5, so we'll probably have to wait a while for a fully stable version to come out. The day it does will be a good day. A very good day.

The free (as in beer) version of VirtualBox can access USB devices. There's also a GPL'ed version, but it's missing that feature, among a few others.

Yeah that drove me nuts too, I though Ubuntu was a piece of shit but it turns out Virtual PC was the problem.

Try http://virtualbox.org/, it works much better.

Hey, check into VirtualBox. Of all the desktop VM managers, it's my favorite. It's free, lightweight, and has more features than parallels or VMware, at least as far as I've seen.

I run XP in it on my linux desktop, and it's great.

Try http://www.virtualbox.org/, if you want free and open source virtualisation software.

In addition to what other /.ers said about WUBI, there's also the possibility to use Live USB distribution.
PenDrive Linux has a lot of resources about this kind of distributions.
I've been using their Quick and easy Pendrivelinux for quite some time.
You can buy commercial preinstalled ones from companies like Mandriva Flash.

It works to a very similar way to WUBI, but on a flash drive.
Essentially it puts 2* big files that contain the file system on the USB drive, and make the USB stick bootable using "syslinux". You start it by hitting F12 when the BIOS starts and choose to boot on the USB drive instead of your hard drive.
(whereas WUBI puts a big file with the partition /on the windows drive/ and adds a new entry to the Windows boot loader to make the system. So you boot you hard drive normally and then use Windows XP's boot menu to select Linux instead of WinXP).

So in that solution, your hard drive is virtually untouched (not that creating a file and adding an entry are *that* much big change) so it may please more the paranoid admins at your company.

Last-but-not-least there's also the running-Linux-inside-Virtualbox (or some other virtual machines that have native-speed performance) solution. It's a bit complicated, but has the benefit of letting you run your Linux apps along side the Windows desktop (with possibilities for native integration, either using a X-Window server for Win32, or using the virtual machine's client tools).

* - most Live USB solutions tend to use 2 files : one is a big read-only file containing the live system, the other is read-writeable and used to store and remember modification (newly installed software, upgrades, user settings, user's home, etc.) between session.
This is because most Live USB distribution are descendant of Live CD distribution (where the CD-Rom is read only and holds the live distro and a RAM-disk holds the modification, using a UNIONFS to bridge the 2 together).
The big advantage of this system is that in case of a big fuckup, you can still reboot using only the original live system (just like a LiveCD) and fix/rebuild/create a new read-write big file.
Of course there are also other solutions for partitioning and installing linux on a USB stick the same way you install it on a harddrive.

Took out a student loan for mine

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Best VM control software I've used. Sun seems to agree as they just bought them out.

It would have been nice to have a link to Innotek and their product: VirtualBox. Which I am pretty sure is not associated with the dog training products that Google ranks at the top of its search.

More to the point: Why did the parent poster get a five when (s)he misses the main point by a million miles?

It's not "... just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students". It is "...just aren't rich enough to provide books for their students".

Let me add to the chorus: It's an education project, not a computer project. The little green computers are just terminals to enable the kids to turn the information presented thereon into knowledge in their brains.

If J. Dvorak had the wit to be able to do so, he would have at least experimented with the software by downloading an emulator from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads/ and the OLPC software from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/. The build OLPC-625.zip works for me. If J. Dvorak had actually installed it, he would have discovered that the said little green box is the work of a team of top level geniuses, instead he just confirms the fact that he is just an ignorant shill squeaking mindlessly for that (in)famous Harvard dropout.

Had he spent just a couple of hours doing that he would have discovered that Nicholas Negroponte et all really do deserve a Nobel Prize.

Many people (myself included) would love nothing more than to move away from M$ products but, sadly, are trapped in them because of the applications we use.

There is a solution. Linux + (Windows inside VirtualBox).

Haven't tested it yet because I've come to hate windows so much that I don't want ANY of it installed in my system. But I've read a couple of VirtualBox reviews, and they're all positive.

One of the unexpected bennies of going all Linux at our household was discovering that a bunch of Windows 3.1 and Dos software that no longer runs on modern Windows (games and educational) suddenly works again. The kids are delighted. JETPACK.EXE might not have 3D graphics, but the gameplay is great. For modern Windows software, I think you'll find that Virtual Box will run any XP software that wine doesn't handle. Or buy VMware and run just about anything that doesn't require high-performance video. Or buy win4lin (paravirtualized Windows for Linux) to run multi-media Windows software better than Windows.