[lug] VirtualBox

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 09:00:51PM -0700, Chuck Morrison wrote:

> I'd never heard of it, but tried it out with several different guest
> OS's. I haven't used it as extensively as I have vmware, but it looks
> very functional. It does use a kernel module and networking (NAT) does
> work, although it doesn't do it as visibly as vmware does (vmnet). I
> wasn't able to get as large a window as I could with vmware, but that
> will probably come.
> 
> It doesn't have the bells and whistles vmware does, but for a single
> instance (ie. personal use) it's worth a download. I succeeded in
> compiling the GPL'd source on ubuntu 6.10 without much problem besides
> getting required source and headers.
> 
> I don't know if it would work for you or not. I never had any problem
> with vmware working for me. Licensing is a different issue.

That sounds good.  I'm mostly interested in it if I need to run Windows again
for some reason.  Since it's all GPL, I'll just check out their installer and
make sure I can fully uninstall before I try it.  I'll be even happier if an
official Debian package is made by the time I need it.

As long as I don't need Windows, Xen does the trick for Linux-only
virtualization.  I have had very good results with the Xen in Debian Etch (36
days of moderate use and counting since last kernel upgrade with no problems).
I'm very pleased with Xen; it is extremely professional, and the Debian
packages make it very easy to set up and manage too.  It's now definitely on
my list of Free software that I can heartily recommend.  I'm glad VMWare broke
down on me, if it hadn't I probably would have been lazy and continued to use
it instead of learning how to use Xen.