Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I realize I’m more than one week behind on this post but it was time for a VirtualBox shout-out. In case you’re not familiar with VBox, it is an open-source, virtualization software package that allows you do some amazing things. VirtualBox is available for the majority of OSs available and it’s free. As you might have read, I recently switched over to Ubuntu Linux on my laptop and work desktop. So far so good if you exlude the fact that I use Adobe CS3 for work and play around the clock. Yes, I’ve tried Wine (Windows Emulator) for Linux but it doesn’t meet my standards - I needed full compatibility. I needed software that would run the Adobe apps I needed to run in a somewhat optimized and efficient manner. That’s when I discovered virtualization, or, the act of virtualizing an entire computer and OS on your current computer and within your operating system. To summarize, I’m running Windows on my Linux laptop thanks to VirtualBox. The beauty of the software is that I can run “seamless” mode which creates the illusion that a Windows application is actually running on my Ubuntu desktop. To switch gears entirely, I can just run full-screen mode and tuck my Ubuntu desktop out-of-sight while I Photoshop away and create websites with Dreamweaver and Flash Professional. It is fairly impressive as far as switching between Windows and Ubuntu as if it were just another app. The primary OS (in my case Ubuntu) is referred to as the “Host OS” whereas the secondary OSs (Windows, OS X, Solaris, etc.) are referred to as the “Guest OSs”. You can add as many Guest OSs as you would like. The OSs share the resources on your machine (RAM, processors, hard drive space, etc.) which can all be fine-tuned and adjusted as necessary to give you the performance you need. Another added feature is the ability to “save the current machine state” and essentially hit the pause button on your guest OS, saving the layout and current view in your guest OS. This put an end to my dual-boot and multi-boot OSs. The next step for me is to optimize my virtualization process to get the machines running at full capacity but that’s a completely different post.