VirtualBox - extremely cool!

[Dr. Z]

Right, remember ages ago I posted about how you can use SeamlessRDP and a hidden VMWare virtual machine to get windows apps served directly to your Linux desktop? Well, tonight I shall show some of you something even better

Its a freeee app called VirtualBox (its in the apt repositories and everything). Install it and it behaves largely like VMWare workstation - except something is different. I had a handy copy of Server 2003 knocking about, so I bunged the ISO into the software (oops!) and installed away. DAMN its fast. This CPU doesn't even have the newfangled virtualisation support and still its flying. Its almost as fast as it would be running on the bare metal. Impressive.

Then, there is the equivalent of VMWare Tools. Install that and things get better. A previously greyed out menu option is now available and things look very much like this:

www.statichiss.co.uk/virtualbox-seamless.png



Also, the remote side of VMWare, which is pretty cool, is sorted out via the RDP protocol - so it just works which is very, very cool and will allow me to run Ubuntu on some thin clients, which is the very best thing ever (I have tried to get a number of RDP servers working with X before, all of them failed).

This development might have single handedly removed Windows from my main desktop because I now have the option of the very best of both worlds and at a decent speed.