I am new to this virtual stuff.

Currently, I dual boot XP / Mepis 7 with XP on primary hdd and Mepis on secondary hdd.

I would like to install at least 1 virtual OS on the Mepis side of my dual boot - preferably Mepis but am open to others.

I looked online to gather some info and was overwhelmed. There were so many choices. Some free. Others not. I have no idea how to evaluate these virtual software offers. Also, I am enough of a tech idiot to be easily fooled.

1) Do you have any favorites? On what do you base that decision? I keep running into "virtual box" and "vmware"; they seem to be the leaders.

2) My needs are really simple and I don't want to spend lots of money. At a minimum, I want to be able to emulate / virtualize at least 1 linux OS (as guest) on my Mepis OS (as host).

It would be nice if I could have some type of "shared" hdd that both host and guest can access without much complication.

I just want a guest OS to play with and try more "risky" things (i.e., updates, etc) to the guest OS that I wouldn't dare try to the host OS. That way, if I mess up, it will only be the guest OS. I can delete it and reinstall it quickly. That is how this whole "virtual" thing works, right?

MBA Whore,

I use VirtualBox on Ultimate Edition 2.1 (aka Ubuntu on steroids?). It is free and available on most repositories for download/install. Check your current install of Mepis and see if it is listed in "emulators". VB is very easy to configure for virtual installations of just about any operating system. I got carried away and installed ten virtual machines for seven different Linux distributions and WinXP and Vista. Installed virtual machines run faster than from the ISO images.

I'm running a dual core e6420 processor with 4Gb of PC-6400 memory. On my equipment the virtual box systems are slower to load after you install them on the virtual drives/machine. I will say that WinXP and Vista seem to load just as fast as a conventional install.

You can activate the CD/DVD rom drives and sound.


Best regards,


marvinudy

i use Virtualbox as i was told it was easy.

for example the shared folder thing is quite easy:
at host side make a shared folder say /home/yourname/SharedFolder
in the settings of the guest-system set it as the sharedfolder
boot into the guest system.
make a mount point, say :/media/shared_folder
mount -t vboxsf SharedFolder /media/shared_folder
thats it.

vmware i don`t know, but virtualbox is easy.

greetings

So, you can put stuff in your shared folder and access it, whether you are in your virtual (guest) OS or your real (host) OS, is that correct?