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.

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.