The program is maintained today by the Software giant Sun Micro-systems as part to their Sun xVM virtualization platform. This will allow Virtual-box to be an application you can trust! Virtual-box runs on Linux, Mac OS X, OS / 2 Warp, Solaris, and Windows XP or Vista and now also Windows 7 but Windows 7 have it's oun system for this as you can read in earlier posts. That Virtual-box supports as many operating systems is in itself very impressive in my opinion.
Using Virtual-box is very easy.
All that is required is basically a computer that has a little power, do you think that your computer is already slow, I think you should stay far away from Virtual-box and other virtualization software.
To start with, of course, is to download and install Virtual-box. You can visit the download page for Virtual-box to download the program, use Linux, you can probably download it via the package manager, or you can go directly to the download page for Linux version of Virtual-box. Note that the program comes in two versions, one with closed source and open source. If you are a home user who only want to test the program I would recommend going for the version with closed source software, this because it contains some features which version of open source have not yet.
When you do this you start Virtual-box, Then you will in the program get a wizard that explains most of it. First you choose what you want the guest machine to be called is it Windows XP call it whit that name and you can optionally select which operating system you are testing the guest machine. Then comes a window where you choose how much memory you want the guest machine to have.
After that you must choose where and how you want to save the guest machine, either as a dynamic file that changes size according to how much you save on the guest computer or a fixed-size. The easiest way is to go for a dynamic file. Finally, select how big this file should be, you chose dynamic earlier this will be the maximum size of the file.
When you do this, select the ISO file to install the operating system is on, the alternative is to use a standard CD / DVD.
Start up the machine and the installation will now begin.
Other key features are worth mentioning:
* Supports many different Guest Operating system.
* Ability to use PAE.
* Good performance.
* Light Intelligent user interfaces.
* Possible to share folders between the guest system and the main system.
* You can save so-called "snapshots" that acts as the restore point.
* Ability to VRDP that allows you to remotely control the guest systems.
* Plus much more!
Finally
I will say that I often use Virtual-box for testing of various applications and operating systems. This is because of that I can test out everything strange without having to worry that I am doing something wrong. Do you like to try and fail, this is definitely worth trying! This may be what it takes to, for example, learn Linux.
Virtual-box is the best virtualization Solutions for home user today in my opinion.
