Virtualization recommendation

[Shlomi Fish]

On Tuesday 15 September 2009 08:53:23 David Suna wrote:
> I just bought a new Gateway laptop that comes with Windows Vista (and a
> free upgrade to Windows 7).  I want to be able to run both Linux (Ubuntu
> is my preferred distribution) and Windows (Vista for now, Windows 7 in
> the future) using virtualization.  I have not gotten into virtualization
> until now so I wanted recommendations about how to go about doing this.
> 
> >From what I have read so far I have the following options:
> 
> 1. Host on Windows using VMWare (either VMware Player or Workstation)
> 
> 2. Host on Windows using Microsoft Virtual PC
> 
> 3. Host on Linux using VMWare, Xen etc but then I have to deal with
> installing Windows since the laptop comes with it but does not have
> separate installation disks
> 
> 
> Recommendations for or against any of the above or information about
> other options that I left out would be appreciated.
> 

You can also use VirtualBox on either Windows or Linux (or some other 
systems):

http://www.virtualbox.org/

VirtualBox is open-source and as opposed to Xen does not require a hypervisor 
to run as the base OS. I've been successfully using VBox to run various 
versions of Linux, and a Windows XP SP 3 VM, and also was able to run the PC-
BSD installer (but the installation failed due to the lack of the second 
 .iso). It seems very nice so far.

So far, I got the best integration from the Win XP (ironically), after I 
installed the host extensions, and the worst from a Fedora VM, where I still 
have to work with a 800*600 resolution due to lack of support from it.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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