VirtualBox Rocks

[Juked07]

Might be a little too on topic for off topic, but this thread has essentially no real software substance (or any substance at all really), so it's going here. I've been using putty to ssh into my school's linux system all semester for all my coding projects because I've been too lazy to get stuff set up in Windows..

I had heard of VirtualBox a while ago but never tried using it until today. I have everything up and running in Ubuntu, and actually having stuff on my own machine is a huge step up in convenience!!

I have color coded Haskell code!!! (I couldn't figure out how to customize emacs through ssh before, if it's even possible). And it indents itself correctly! I highly doubt anyone will share my enthusiasm, but it's quite awesome after a semester of terrible unhelpful text editing to write code.

 

[dwell]

Virtualization is definitely ready for prime time these days. I do the same thing to get a Linux environment without dedicating a full machine for it.

 

[ultimatebob]

I like VMWare better, since I've had stability issues running Linux VM's under Virtualbox. I now use VMWare Player on my laptop at work (it's free, and lets you create VM's without having to use cheesy hacks now), and ESXi when I have spare hardware that supports it.

Nothing sucks more than watching VirtualBox crash when you have a bunch of VM's open, and finding out that half of your VM's have unrecoverable file system errors when you restart them.

 

[PingSpike]

I haven't done much with virtualization, but I have been looking more at it recently. I've used vmware a bit at work for some testing. At home was thinking of switching my file/torrent box/wsus box around. I was thinking of rebuilding as an atom box to save on power usage, running a VM to do wsus or something. I like the idea of being able to throw my hardware out, build a new one and then just bring the old images back online. With windows if the hard drive controllers don't match and the motherboard goes you're kind of fucked.

I don't know...the more I think about it the more I think I may not really have a problem at home that is a good fit for virtualization. Might be a fun learning experience though.

 

[KeithP]

There is a new version of Virtualbox available, 4.0. Apparently it is a major release:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

-KeithP

 

[Terzo]

I've been using VM Player for probably around 9 months now. Mainly use it so I don't have to deal with WINE or rebooting into Windows when I want to play a game.