Oracle VM VirtualBox is available free of cost for personal use and could be easily installed atop GNU/Linux distribution. Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2 released a couple of days back is the first releases of VirtualBox software after acquisition of Sun by Oracle and offers a number of bug-fixes and new features over the previous versions.
Some of the major changes in VirtualBox 3.2 include -
- Storage I/O subsystem – VirtualBox 3.2 offers a completely re-worked virtual disk subsystem which utilizes asynchronous I/O to achieve high-performance whilst maintaining high data integrity
- In-hypervisor Networking – Significant optimization of the networking subsystem has reduced context switching between guests and host, increasing network throughput by up to 25%.
- New Storage I/O subsystem – VirtualBox 3.2 offers a completely re-worked virtual disk subsystem which utilizes asynchronous I/O to achieve high-performance whilst maintaining high data integrity;
- USB Keyboard and Mouse – Support more guests that require USB input devices
- Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”) – Support for both the desktop and server version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution;
I have been using VirtualBox for the past few months, primarily to run Microsoft Windows inside running environment of Ubuntu; One of the reasons for using Microsoft Windows is a lot of retro-programming (8 bit NES ) tools need Microsoft Windows environment and I am forced to use it. I have been quiet satisfied with performance and features of VirtualBox and I was particularly impressed with ease of use of VirtualBox. I had found VMWare very bloated compared to VirtualBox.
Installing VirtualBox under Ubuntu 10.04
I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 for a couple of weeks, and I would hence describe steps followed to install VirtualBox 3.2 under Ubuntu 10.04.
To install Oracle VM VirtualBox, open terminal window from (Application-> Accessories -> Terminal ) and issue the following command :
This should add the VirtualBox repository to the sources.list file and allow you to install VirtualBox using apt-get. We also need to add verification key, which we can do so by issuing the following command to download and install the key.
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lucid non-free"
Finally , we issue these set of commands to update the repository on local system and install VirtualBox 3.2
wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
and
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.2
This should download VirtualBox-3.2 onto your system(on my system the entire download was about 48 Megabytes ) and install VirtualBox, which you can launch from (Applications -> System Tools -> Oracle VM VirtualBox ).
Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Linux on Desktop Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2009 , Ambuj Varshney
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