gemmapeter.co.uk

Last weekend I went to the Devon and Cornwall Linux User Group meeting in a Computer shop in Penzance (which is why I skipped the Termisoc LOTR marathon) and thanks to Viv I got to see Virtualbox in use. Virtualbox is virtualisation software that lets you run several operating systems on the same computer at the same time by tricking the guest operating system into thinking it’s running on it’s very own computer.

Today I went about installing it using the Debian packages virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-source and installing Windows XP home in a disk image which I’m probably going to use regularly for checking sites in Internet Explorer. To me this looks like a much easier solution than trying to force a program to work in Wine although the downside is that you need a copy of windows.

The guest operating system runs smoothly at a resolution of 800×600 but it feels bizarre to be using Windows in a window. I’m also considering installing some other things like maybe Solaris or BSD in other images just to have a play with them.

Since I thought I might want a bit more memory in the host OS before letting multiple other OSes have a chunk of it I decided to upgrade my PC (first major upgrade since 2004) this will probably be the last major upgrade it will ever get. It now has triple the RAM (now 1.5GB) and a slightly quieter CPU fan (or at least one that doesn’t make the case resonate).

Update: 2007/11/16 I’ve also replaced my NVidia GeForce 4 with a NVidia 7600GT unfortuantely due to my widescreen TFT and somewhat small desk I am unlikely to use the dual headedness feature of it (though if i did get another similar monitor I’d have a whole metre of horizontal screen space)