Today I spent a few minutes checking out VirtualBox which is Sun/Oracle’s open source Virtual Machine (VM) system which is free for home use. Once downloaded you can visit http://virtualboxes.org for a large number of OS disk images which are relatively easily installed. I did have to edit the XML file it puts into your user profile, I will see if there is an easier way to do this or if these instructions are provided somewhere obvious and if not post the relevant info up here.
What VirtualBox enables you to do is host any number of VMs which can be launched on your desktop as required. For those that are uninitiated VMs are very clever software virtualisations of physical machines
. They have applications ranging from a home user trying out a new OS such as a linux distribution, to software developers using them for testing and simulation of distributed software.
The system compares well and has many similar features as the most popular VM products from VMware. As far as any detailed analysis goes, as yet I can’t really offer an opinion, I’ve not enough knowledge of other VM products and haven’t used VirtualBox enough to really say anything much. From initial impressions it seems to compete well. Here you see a screenshot of VirtualBox running a Damn Small Linux image.
