Ars has brought our attention to yet another new of the virtualization software package, VirtualBox. What makes this stand out? It’s open source! It’s free! Wait… so is Q.
Ok, ok. So VirtualBox weighs 21 MB instead of Parallel’s “hefty” 88 MB and Fusion’s “morbidly obese” 171 MB. Great because the 1 GB hard drive option is so expensive. Wait, I have oodles of disk space. Ok, so it has problems in its current form.
* No support for Host Interface Networking
* No support for Internal Networking
* No support for audio input
* No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
* No support for raw disk access
* USB support is not stable or fully functional yet
* The numlock emulation isn't implemented yet
* The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts
That’s not a good thing. I like strong networking support. I like support for hardware virtualization features (you know, the “rarely required” stuff). Raw disk access = Boot Camp disk support. USB support is a highly useful feature.
This may be free, but honestly, the whole point of virtualization from a consumer standpoint is making Windows easier to work with. This doesn’t seem to be achieving that goal. Maybe Sun, who now owns the product, will enhance it, but for now, it’s mostly going to be a novelty download.
Fusion works so well! I wouldn't waste my time with open source solutions, at least not until they're finished with it! ;)
VirtualBox is a good free choice between Parallel and VMware for those that wish test Linux distros or at least windows. Here is a screencast on how to install Ubuntu by VB:
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/ci6ObVGL
Did you forget: It's FREE. It does what I need it to do: A safe way try our Windows software downloaded from the web and to try our various OS ( FreeBSD, Linux etc ).