On 29/11/16 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
I've used it mostly for Windows guests (2000, XP, 7, 10), for one or two programs I still need, and it has worked reasonably well. I started using it because the Linux machines I had back then didn't have VT extension support, which limited which virtualisation platforms could handle a non-Linux guest. I found the VirtualBox management GUI intuitive, but I only have a few VMs, I'm not sure how well it would scale for managing a bunch of guests. It also has a command line tool. They have a dual licensing system, where VirtualBox itself is GPL, but the extensions are under a closed licence. The extensions including things like USB support for the guest. It needs kernel modules built for it, but this process is all handled by the packaging system these days (at least in Debian), which has made it a lot less painful than it used to be. I did have issues running very old OSes (eg Win95), but that was more a problem with the guest kernels having a busy idle and there were workarounds. I've also had some instability with enabling the 2D graphics acceleration support (guest machines just exiting suddenly when running eg a game that used the acceleration support). Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65