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VirtualBox: Open Virtual Machines on UltraLapSR

Posted on 10 March 2008 by


I am working on the UltraLap Review, honestly I am, but one thing I wanted to do with it was show you just how much power even a laptop has these days. I also wanted to show you a alternative to VMware or Parallels.

virtualbox.png

Yes this is a screenshot of gOS and Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 5 running each in their own VM’s on Ubuntu Gutsy on the UltraLap, however I am not using VMWare. I am using a program called VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is a Open Source virtualization program that is very similar to VMware, but is Free and Open Source. With VirtualBox, you can run different versions of the distro you run, you can run Windows, you can run Linux or any other x86 based OS.

VirtualBox is very efficient. In the screenshot, you can see the CPU isn’t maxed out even though I have 2 VM’s running plus a e-mail program. One of the VM’s is actually playing a MP3 so it performs well enough that you can actually use the VM. That’s a testament of both the hardware, a Zareason UltraLapSR and the software.

Now you can virtualize Windows on Linux to run those apps you just can’t tear yourself away from. VirtualBox won’t run games, but then most games are probably too sensative regarding CPU power and would probably run terribly in any VM.

Things you could use virtual box for are:

  1. Running Windows Apps.
  2. Jailing apps you want to keep secure from the internet.
  3. Running other distros of Linux.
  4. Software development.
  5. Web development (see what it looks like in Internet Explorer without need for a separate machine or dual booting)

One important thing is that there is a closed version of Virtual Box. This version is still cost free for personal, evaluation and academic use, but I cannot find anywhere on their page on what cost of the closed version would be for commercial use. The things that the closed version can do that the Open Source Edition (now referred to as OSE) can’t do are:

  1. Remote Display Protocol (RDP) Server – Use Windows Remote Desktop into any VM.
  2. USB Support – passthrough USB drives or devices to the virtual machine.
  3. USB over RDP – pass USB devices to the VM via Remote Desktop Protocol.
  4. iSCSI Initiator – using iSCSI targets as disks for the virtual machine.

Now innotek, the company that has produced VirtualBox, has been recently purchased by Sun Microsystems, so some of the things in this article are subject to change, but the best part is it’s already GPL’d so it’s not likely we will loose this virtual machine.

VirtualBox runs on Linux, Mac OS X (only on Intel) and OpenSolaris.

This post was written by:

- who has written 491 posts on Gear Diary.

Joel is a system admin for a local college in Columbus, OH. While he loves Linux and tend to use it more than anything else, he will stoop to running closed source if it is the best tool for the job. His techno passions are Linux, Android, netbooks, GPS, podcasting and Personal Media Players.

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  • http://www.geardiary.com Allen Hong

    Thats sweet!!! Can it run MS-DOS too? My biggest disappointment with all these software (VMware, Parrallels, and VirtualBox) is that for Mac’s, a intel based processor is required. Could they not figure out how to make it work on a powerpc processor?

  • Joel Mclaughlin
  • Joel Mclaughlin

    Oh and to make it work on PowerPC would require you to emulate the x86 instruction set. There WAS a emulator that would do that, but since Mac switched to intel…

  • http://www.geardiary.com Allen Hong

    Joel: I see. A Google search leads to a website listing all the emulatiom projects and there are some on that will work on a powerpc. But, the others seem to lack the polish of VirtualBox.

  • Joel Mclaughlin

    Yeah. VirtualBox is really nice. I see it becoming more like VMWare in the future. I hope they develop something that can be compared to the ESX version of VMware.

    PowerPC is almost dead with exception of the server level. IBM will eventually start to take Power away from PowerPC or make the instruction sets so different that you’d be running in a crippled mode to use PowerPC instructions on POWER or pSeries machines.

    As nice as PowerPC was, it will likely never reappear on the Desktop and definitely not on laptops.

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