VirtualBox Seamless = Perfect Win-Linux Client
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Finally, I have a workstation running Ubuntu 8.04 on Windows, simultaneously, and you can't tell which application is using which OS. The Linux applications break-out of their virtual box and run in the Windows desktop space. It's a little weird, at first, because using the "seamless" option creates two screen taskbars (one Windows, one Linux).
VirtualBox was purchased by Sun Microsystems in February and is appreciated as the "best virtual solution that you've never heard of." It runs on Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris and Macintosh systems.
LinuxHaxor has a good over view on the installation of the latest VirtualBox. The only part that might be tricky for the Linux newbies is creating a shared directory. VirtualBox is not as GUI friendly in offering a shared folder as is VMWare.
To make my shared Window folders, I used VirtualBox's GUI to create the mapping. Oddly, though, the mapping doesn't actually instantiate the sharing, it merely defines it. More work has to be done. Here's the steps:
The latest edition of VirtualBox has not yet made it into the current Ubuntu 8.04 repository. When it does, I'll be installing it on my Linux boxes to make accessing Windows applications transparent to the GUI. VirtualBox does have a Macintosh edition, but it doesn't support the "seamless" mode in this release.
If the VirtualBox "seamless" edition works as well for a Linux host as it does for a Windows host, then I'm going to recommend it above WINE or other solutions for running Windows on Linux.
Technorati Tags: VirtualBox
Finally, I have a workstation running Ubuntu 8.04 on Windows, simultaneously, and you can't tell which application is using which OS. The Linux applications break-out of their virtual box and run in the Windows desktop space. It's a little weird, at first, because using the "seamless" option creates two screen taskbars (one Windows, one Linux).
VirtualBox was purchased by Sun Microsystems in February and is appreciated as the "best virtual solution that you've never heard of." It runs on Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris and Macintosh systems.
LinuxHaxor has a good over view on the installation of the latest VirtualBox. The only part that might be tricky for the Linux newbies is creating a shared directory. VirtualBox is not as GUI friendly in offering a shared folder as is VMWare.
To make my shared Window folders, I used VirtualBox's GUI to create the mapping. Oddly, though, the mapping doesn't actually instantiate the sharing, it merely defines it. More work has to be done. Here's the steps:
- Create the VirtualBox mapping for the Windows shared folders in the preferences.
- Create a directory under /media
- Now, you want to map the /media directory to the shared folder. First, it needs to be tested, and then installed so it'll be available on every startup.
- The syntax will be something like the following, where "DOCUMENTS" is the name of the shared folder created by VirtualBox and /media/documents is the sub-directory I created under /media:
mount -t vboxsf DOCUMENTS /media/documents - Test it with sudo, if you don't have it right run a "umount /media/documents" and try again after you double check the settings.
- Once you have it working, you'll want it active everytime you run this Linux instance. The documentation suggests that the /etc/fstab can be modified for auto-mounting of the shared folder. I couldn't get that working, so I'm going to suggest a bearable work-around. Take the command-line script that you just wrote and add it to the /etc/rc.local file. In this way, the code will be run everytime you login to your account.
The latest edition of VirtualBox has not yet made it into the current Ubuntu 8.04 repository. When it does, I'll be installing it on my Linux boxes to make accessing Windows applications transparent to the GUI. VirtualBox does have a Macintosh edition, but it doesn't support the "seamless" mode in this release.
If the VirtualBox "seamless" edition works as well for a Linux host as it does for a Windows host, then I'm going to recommend it above WINE or other solutions for running Windows on Linux.
Technorati Tags: VirtualBox
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