One of our new years resolutions is to make use of more open source applications in the day to day running of toggle, this is the first in a series of posts where we will be finding open source alternatives to software we use regularly.
Last year we posted up some of our favourite Mac applications, and in that list was Parallels Desktop; a visualisation software that allows you to run Windows as an application on your Mac. Visualisation is an important part of our web development process as we check all of the websites we create on a range of browsers and operating systems. With software like Parallels we can run Linux, Windows and Mac OSX together without the need to constantly reboot or own a bunch of different computers with varying software configurations. Shortly after we had purchased two licenses for Parallels, the software was upgraded to version 4 and over the last 6 months our version has become increasingly unstable. It was time to look for an alternative.
Enter VirtualBox, developed by Sun Microsystems and distributed under the GNU GPL. VirtualBox may not be tricked out with all the eye candy of Parallels but it is extremely stable, fast and in my opinion much easier to use. You will need to make sure you have installed guest additions from the menu within VirtualBox to get the most out of the software. Guest additions makes integration between the two operating systems much more seamless, features included mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest OS window).
From the main VirtualBox window you can easily control the amount of system resource available to each guest operating system, organise snapshots (e.g. revert to a point where Linux still worked before Scott broke it) and install new operating systems. I have both Ubuntu and Windows XP installed so far. VirtualBox even handled running a few games too (for testing purposes of course!).
Overall we are really impressed with the VirtualBox and suggest you give it a try. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
3 Comments
Sounds great – I’ll give it a go. Same situation with Parallels, so I look forward to trying it out – thanks!
Hi Ross, let us know how you get on with VirtualBox it would be good to hear your thoughts!
I’ve installed Win XP so far with IE6, 7, 8 and it seems quite stable. I do miss the copy and paste and drag and drop functionality from Parallels, but as it’s open-source, I’m very happy with it!