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VirtualBox 2.1.0


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VirtualBox 2.1.0

File Size: 38.5 MB

License: Open Source

Operating Systems: Windows 2K/03/XP/Vista

HomePage: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox

Screenshots: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Screenshots

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software

Features

Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox.

Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers.

Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window).

Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.

Extra Features

Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.

Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to "run" the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.

USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

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Oh you mean something on the order of what VMware Player has as one of its features,

Share data between host computer and virtual machine

Copy text and files between the virtual machine and the host PC. Drag and drop files between a Windows host PC and a Windows virtual machine. Or, enable Shared Folders to seamlessly access data on your host computer.

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Drag-and-drop support would be convinient, but it sounds like something technically difficult to implement.

Not all operating systems support drag-and-drop, and of those who do, they all have an different implementation.

So you cant make an vendor-agnostic support, you would have to make special cases that add support for specific operating systems since there is no clean unified way to accomplish it.

Though, there are VirtualBox guest additions that you can install that add support for more features. Maybe there is drag-and-drop support via an extension.

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Just out of interest, how many VM's implement this:-

... 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts ...

??

I don't know.

I just now that in this version, it now does support running 64-bit guests on 32-bit hosts and that in previous versions it didn't.

This is great news for me, since I currently run a 32-bit host, and were looking to run a 64-bit guest.

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Someday I am going to use this Virtual Box, see what's under the hood and take it out for a spin.

In turn, it lets you take out other stuff for a spin.

It have allowed me to take out so much stuff for a spin, that I otherwise would not have done.

I've tried gOS, FreeDOS, Fedora, OpenSolaris, Damn Small Linux, AROS, Windows Server 2008, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, etc. Lots of different operating systems.

I wanted to try out Vista in it too, but didn't find any trial version.

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Yeah, I will try out Vista some more now.

I liked OpenSolaris, maybe in a few years it will be a bigger contender to Windows, Mac and Linux. It uses the GNOME desktop environment and got ZFS, the absolute best file system in existence today.

The ZFS file system is much better than the current file systems in Windows, Linux and Mac. It got storage pools, dynamic striping, snapshots, etc. ext3, HFS+, NTFS just cant compare, not even ext4 will match ZFS.

It got powerful software for developers like DTrace.

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