Ever had these questions in your mind..?
- You are a windows user but want to try linux
- You are interested in trying linux but don’t want to ditch windows either
- You want linux and windows in your machine without disturbing each other
- You are afraid of installing linux as it might make your machine unusable or might destroy your data
If your answer is “yes”, read further…
Working on ubuntu running on top of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 started giving me lot of problems. Some of them are:
1. Need lots of tweaking during installation of ubuntu in virtual pc to provide even basic mouse integration. Need to enter additional parameters (i8042.noloop) during boot up and then need to configure some system settings to make the mouse work in ubuntu running under virtual pc.
2. No smooth mouse integration. You need to click inside the virtual operating system for the mouse to be effective inside and need to press “Right Alt” key to come out of virtual os.
3. No mouse scrolling support at all.
4. In a nutshell, virtual pc bothers least about linux environments. No addons, nothing. ( Please correct me if I’m wrong here. Thank you)
So, I started looking for alternatives.
I didn’t give much focus to VirtualBox until i read the news about Sun’s acquisition about VirtualBox. I respect Sun and their products. So i thought of giving VirtualBox a try.
- Installing ubuntu was smooth.
- No need to tweak any boot options like i did while installing ubuntu on top of virtual pc 2007.
- However i needed to press “Right Ctrl” key to come out of virtual box, initially.
- But, once i installed the “add-ons” for linux, i was amazed at the seamless mouse integration. I could click the firefox icon in windows xp and also on ubuntu on virtualbox (to and fro) without pressing any keys.
- I could scroll my mouse like i can scroll on xp.
- Excellent user interface.
However i have some concerns:
- very small resolution size (800 x 600 against my laptop resolution of 1280 x 780)
(NOTE: I managed to fix this problem. I’ve narrated about it here.
- need add-ons to provide usb support.
But overall, I feel that virtualbox is much better than Virtual PC 2007.
I regret for spending much time meddling around with Virtual PC 2007.
The fault is with me, I shouldn’t have tried a Microsoft product at first place.
Read more about virtualization/virtualbox here.
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