VirtualBox

In my continuing quest to both try new things in general, and try new things that will help me be more productive, I recently set up VirtualBox.

Before, I had left WinXP running on my laptop, and I would remote desktop into it to run any Windows-only application I required. (About 3 of these.)

I want to eventally remove any installed Windows altogether, and just bring up a virtualized WinXP when I have to run one of these applications. It’s a minor step in one sense, but I like the idea of removing Windows entirely from any “real” machine I have.

Installation

There’s really not much to say about installing VirtualBox, because it’s just as easy as one could hope. I chose the binary version (I understand it has a few more features than the OSE version).

After that, as seems with so many things, there are a few minor things to do to get things working how you like:

Guest Additions

These are little features specific to the Guest OS that make things work a lot smoother. For example, when you first install WinXP in VirtualBox, the mouse is “captured” and you have to “un-capture” it with the right control key to move it out of the VirtualBox window, and so forth.

However, once you install the Guest Additions, then the mouse is automatically captured and released as you mouse over the window.

There are some other goodies as well, like being able to share clipboard data between the Host and Guest, so Guest Additions are a must.

USB Support

This is a bit complicated as you have to set up some permissions and there are many slight variations all around the web telling you how to do this. One blog entry that helped me was here.

Make sure you then enable USB support from the Details section for the machine. You can then select the USB device to expose to the Guest OS from the small USB icon on the bottom right of the VirtualBox window border. Easy peasy.

Sharing a folder

This is very simple in the latest version, so don’t worry about mounting anything (like the blog post I linked to above). Just select the folder you want to share from the Details tab for the Virtual Machine.

Then, in WinXP you drop into a command line and type:

net use x: \\vboxsvr\SHARENAME

You can see the shared folder information, including the SHARENAME portion, from the small folder icon on the bottom right border of the VirtualBox window.

Seamless Mode

This is a pretty cool feature that basically does away with the VirtualBox containing window. It puts the WinXP taskbar across the bottom of the current screen, and then any Windows applications you open will pop-up right on your desktop. (They will have the current Windows theme applied.)

You have to allow at least 10MB of video memory for this to work, and the refresh is not flawless. You can glimpse the WinXP wallpaper when dragging a window about and sometimes when maximizing things get a bit hinky.

Still, it is a way cool feature; combined with Compiz I like to have 2 workspaces so I can “flip” between them. (Mostly you see people with 4 workspaces so they can have a full cube, but I find 2 is actually useful.)

Since I have TwinView on Monitors 1 and 2, and a seperate X screen on Monitor 3, I like to “flip” to the “backside” of Monitor 3, and open up a seamless WinXP there. My mouse wheel rotates the “cube”, so I just mouse anywhere over the desktop background to hide the shame of using Windows!

Very nice!

Choices

Although I’ve just started using VirtualBox, I’m really warming up to it. This means I have 5 options right now for handling “Windows-only” work:

1. Just running WinXP on my laptop.
2. Remote Desktop into WinXP on my laptop from my Ubuntu desktop.
3. VirtualBox on my Ubuntu desktop.
4. Wine
5. Linux apps that can handle Windows documents.

I list these in what I consider least-desirable to most-desireable.

Screenshot!

Here’s a screenie of what Seamless mode looks like. This is on the “back” side of my third monitor, which as I mentioned is a seperate X screen and where I usually keep Pidgin, a terminal or two, and similar things open:

Note the Gnome panel across the top, where it always is for me. Seamless mode adds the WinXP bar across the bottom. That last icon in the WinXP tray before the clock is the Guest Additions icon. All the windows on the screen are Windows applications, except the one titled “Sun xVM VirtualBox”.

The background is my normal (boring) Ubuntu wallpaper.

Also, note the X: under WinXPs Network Drives, this is a shared folder that resides in my ~ directory in Ubuntu. This lets me easily work on a file in a Windows environment if I must.

Finally “crapollo” is the virtual machine running XP, because “apollo” is my real Ubuntu machine! :)

2008.05.13 Edited to add:

If you use extended language support, you might run across a problem where the keyboard won’t work in the Guest OS. If it is a USB keyboard, you might get it “stuck” in the Guest OS, and lose it in the Host OS. An Ubuntu Forums post that helped me on this is here.