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innotex VirtualBox wannabe review

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Story time. I still run Windows for one purpose. Or more specifically, for one program: Sid Meier's Alpha Centari (SMAC). I'm not much of a gamer and those take-over-the-world strategy games are about all that appeal to me, and SMAC is the best of the genre. So since my laptop came with XP, I have to dual boot to play SMAC.

A few years ago I "bought" (aka licensed or rented) a copy of VMware and ran Windows right on my Debian box. VMware is really slick commercial virtualization software. But as I recall, I paid like $300 for it. Pricey and restrictive, but slick.

A month or so I upgraded the HD in my laptop. At the time I thought about abandoning the dual-boot mode and again running VMware on Debian. But to upgrade to the newest version was going to cost me $100. Since I'm cheap, I thought that was ridiculous. So I still did a dual-boot with the laptop.

Then I ran across innotex's VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a GPL-licensed, virtual machine system much like, from my point of view, VMware. (VirtualBox binaries are for personal or evaluation use as innotex sells a commercial version of VirtualBox with add'l features.)

VirtualBox allows you to define a virtual machine, allocating its virtual hard drive(s) to a file located by default in ~/.VirtualBox/. Not only can you define how much RAM and disk space a virtual machine has, but also things like access to other parts of the Linux file system, or whether or not the virtual machine has access to NICs or CD-ROMs, etc.

Once defined you can install Linux or Windows or another operating system. In my WinXP example, VirtualBox booted off the CD and installed Windows normally. From that point on you can have a full Windows system running -- full screen or windowed -- on your Debian desktop.

I in no way pushed the envelope with Windows -- remember, all I want to do is to play SMAC. But toying with VirtualBox seems like it's polished, reliable, flexible with a surprising number of neat features, and is quite handy.

But one of the best things about VirtualBox is the Debian (and also Ubuntu) install. A simple entry into Debian's /etc/apt/sources.list will allow you to use aptitude or any other apt-get package manager to add the software. The VirtualBox *.deb adds the software into Debian's menu and a GUI program allows you to manage your virtual machines.

If you've got the hardware (VMs like RAM and disk space) VirtualBox will make it easy to run multiple operating systems concurrently.

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innotex VirtualBox wannabe

Submitted by 1 on Wed, 2008-01-23 17:05.

Nice, but, would you be able to add an already existing WinXP configuration to virtual box? I mean just to replace multi boot with virtualbox without needing to reinstall WinXp.

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Re: innotex VirtualBox wannabe

Submitted by IntnsRed on Thu, 2008-01-24 08:09.

No, I don't think so (at least I haven't seen it). My guess is that such a feature is really hard to do just because Windows is so tightly wedded to the hardware. Installing Windows into a VM, the VM's hardware is "generic" so that it can be run on different machines.

IMHO, one of VirtualBox's short points is the handling of different VMs. There is no easy/GUI way to copy them. (As an aside, as I understand, VMware puts many such restrictions on operations with VMs under pressure of software companies.)

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Re: innotex VirtualBox wannabe

Submitted by thveillon on Tue, 2008-03-04 18:41.

You can use "vmware converter" to "rip" an existing windows installation. It's freely available for download and there's no need for a serial number. Just be sure to choose the "5" format (vmware server compatible) which is VirtualBox compatible. The only limitation is that VirtualBox will use the vm in write-through mode so snapshotting won't be available, but this limitation is due to be lifted in a near release. I used it with an XP install a few days ago, so it's really working, not just "sort off" ! Conversion took about 40mns, windows install is left untouched, image has to be written to another disk (local, external or network is fine).

By the way, vmware server is now free (as in beer, not speech)

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