Let’s get virtual


Almost a year ago I was posting about my new MacBook and how I installed Bootcamp in it to try it out. It was a fun test although I have only launched my Windows XP partition a couple of times in the past year. There is nothing I cannot run in OS X so having Windows XP on my MacBook has been pretty useless.

A few months ago I also successfully tried an Ubuntu Live CD. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution and a Live CD allows you to run the operative system without installing it in your computer.

Today I was reading the unofficial apple weblog and found out about VirtualBox: a virtualization open source software from Sun Microsystems. Up until now I knew that you could use VMWare (which I use at work) or Parallels on your Mac, but those were all commercial packages and I didn’t wanted to spend any money since all I wanted was to learn and experiment. I was really excited to find out that I could install Ubuntu on my Mac using VirtualBox for free.

Creating a new Virtual Machine (VM) was really simple and currently Ubuntu 8.04 is being installed as I write this post.

Ubuntu installation on VitualBox

It actually is taking me longer to write this post, than for Ubuntu to get installed on the VM. The installation is done, and now it is downloading 46 software updates which means that at least the network is working like a charm!

Ubuntu running on VitualBox on a MacBook

Now this is the bragging part of the post:
I can now run 3 freaking operative systems on my MacBook and if I create a Windows VM image I can run them simultaneously!

The world is no longer flat my friends.

Yes I did notice that the Ubuntu clock is one hour behind…


2 responses to “Let’s get virtual”

  1. Ten minutes ago as I was going through my Google Reader posts I read about Virtual Box and thought that it’d be fun to try it out with the new Ubuntu.

    Then I see your post. I’d like to hear more about your experiments.