[plug] rave about virtualbox

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

Just a quickie. I've been a huge devotee of Win4lin, then qemu for all my VM stuff. (I still use 
qemu heavily for development and testing)
I tried VMWare and it just never grew on me.

I finally bit the bullet and decided to give virtualbox a try as I have a need now to run Autocad 
and it won't play in WINE.

All I can say is *wow*. It installs windows cleanly about 35% faster than under qemu, and with the 
native video driver and rest of the fruit I am seriously impressed. Plus of course it's mostly open 
source (the bits I use are anyway).

This laptop ain't the fastest thing on 2 legs, but virtualbox makes a windows VM actually usable to 
some form of production level. It's honestly not that far behind XP on the bare metal and this is 
without any VT extensions on the processor. (They reckon that VT does not really speed virtualbox up 
that much anyway)

Oh and the best bit, dpkg -i just worked. It found my kernel source, compiled it all up and verily 
was great! Win4Lin does the same thing, but being pretty solidly based on qemu, it's just slower all 
round.

Colour me impressed.

I'm about to go drop some $$ on a mac mini and I had planned to triple boot macos, ubuntu and XP, 
but this is so good I'll just run a windows VM in ubuntu instead.

Brad
-- 
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