The VirtualBox virtual machine software for Linux and Windows has been steadily improving. One very notable feature added recently is support for multiple virtual CPU cores. The feature requires hardware virtual support and works on newer Intel or AMD CPUs.

The Direct 3D support is also steadily improving and I expect that it may be able to allow additional games and perhaps Vista Aero in a virtual OS in the near future.

The "seamless" display mode has been in VirtualBox for a while and that allows one to combine the desktop windows for the virtual machines and host OS in the same desktop display. The task bar of a virtual operating system stacks just above the normal OS task bar at the bottom of the desktop.

Another new feature is a mini toolbar for full screen or "seamless" mode to use commands that are normally in the menu of the virtual machine window.

VirtualBox has also been adding support for more Linux distros and Slackware (that I use) is fully supported, as well as Ubuntu.

VirtualBox isn't perfect but the rich set of features and support for identical virtual disks and features in Linux and Windows make it an excellent choice.

You can find VirtualBox at http://www.virtualbox.org

Did you have a question?

My apologies. I didn't realize this forum was for software questions only. Perhaps a moderator can move or delete it. In the future I will refrain from posting thing here that aren't software questions.

I thought 3.0.0 was a severe backward step (Vista host) - junk actually as all guests looped and eventually corrupted.
3.0.2 fixed some of the issues.

I use it only when I'm bored.

I haven't had any big problems with 3.0.2. I did have virtual disk corruption problems in previous versions until I realized that it was due to sharing virtual disk files between Windows and Linux. Mostly that caused Windows to crash. I haven't tested this but I suspect that a fixed-size virtual disk may not have the problem.

I'm doing a lot of software development in a Windows XP Guest OS on a Windows Vista Host OS. So far it hasn't failed after many months of use. There are some things like mapping serial ports that do crash VirtualBox.

Hello :-)

I'd so much like to get rid of that mini-toolbar. Any ideas?

Apart from that 3.0.2 is OK -- not a stable as 2.1.x (ocassional screen drawing glitches and had a problem NFS-mounting from host over a bridge network but worked around) but good enough.

Best

Charles

Look in the "General" options for the virtual machine. On the "Advanced" tab is an option to enable or disable the mini toolbar. I turned mine off too. It's a nice idea but the position is annoying and can't be changed.

Thanks, Erik

Another minor annoyance bites the dust!

[FX: embarrassed -- I'm sure(TM) I checked all the settings for how to do that ]

Best

Charles

The recently released VirtualBox 3.0.4 now allows the min-toolbar to be placed at the top or the bottom. That's just one of the bug fixes and improvements.

The recently released 3.0.6 has many bugfixes listed in the changelog and feels more stable but I'm still having problems with unreliable networking (NFS and samba mount failures) and frequent VM shutdown dialogs during guest boot (a nuisance rather than a major problem).

I switched back to tap and bridge-utils on the host instead of using VirtualBox's built-in bridging but it did not seem to make any difference.

Three taps are configured for the convenience of being able to run any two guests simultaneously -- tap0, tap1 and tap2. Given the intermittent nature of the problem it's hard to be 100% sure what works best but I'm fairly convinced that a) tap0 is more reliable than the others and b) after network mount failure, the VM must be shut down rather than simply rebooted to get a successful network mount.

This using ubuntu 8.04.3 and Xfce 4.6.1 on host with WXP, ubuntu 8.04.3 and Slackware 13 guests.

I also noticed that 3.0.6 Guest Additions won't install on Windows NT 4.0. After a bit of fiddling I got it to install but then NT 4.0 won't boot. It aborts with a Stop error complaining about an entry point not being found. The previous versions of Guest Additions do seem to work with VirtualBox 3.0.6 so one can install (or keep) those for NT 4.0.