As most people do,when I started using Linux, I created separate partitions for Linux and used Lilo or Grub to boot either into either window 11 iso download or Linux, according to the different job requirements.
I normally used my laptop PC during the day in a company that used Windows applications in a Windows based LAN and therefore I normally had to boot in Windows during the day to work with my colleagues whereas at home I would boot mainly into Linux. This approach has a few disadvantages as follows:
- My work e-mails were in Microsoft Outlook and I had to boot under Windows to access them.
- I used KMail (and later Mozilla Thunderbird) for my personal e-mails and I had to boot under Linux to access them.
- I could access Window folders from Linux and copy data from Windows, but I could not access any Linux directory from Windows.
I reached the conclusion that there should have been a better way to use my PC and I looked for a solution that would allow to access both Linux and Windows applications without rebooting.
I investigated some of the available products. I found that the wine or CodeWeavers Crossover supported most common Windows applications, but some other ones would not work. VMWare looked interesting, but I preferred to use until recently Win4Lin (originally developed by Netraverse to support only Windows 95, 98 or ME and later upgraded by Virtual Bridges to support also Windows 2000 and Windows XP) but this product is no longer upgraded and supported,
I had to find a replacement and finally decided to install Virtual BOx, a virtualization platform originally developed by Sun Micro Systems and later supported by Oracle, after its acquisition of Sun.
Some good advantages that I found in Virtual Box are the following:
- VirtualBox 3 is a desktop virtual machine application using a “Type 2” hypervisor that requires a compatible host operating system (Linux, Windows, Macintosh, or OpenSolaris) and computer hardware based on x86 or AMD64/Intel64 to function
- The installation of Virtual Box is pretty straightforward, but there are a few issues that I will describe later.
- You can easily install many different Operating systems and the performance is pretty good. You can read a list of the supported Operating Systems at virtualbox.org/
- Creating a VM is fast and easy, thanks to a VM creation wizard that takes you step-by-step through creating your guest VM.
Installing Virtual Box
Virtual Box can be downloaded from virtualbox.org, but I did not have to download it because the software is included with my Linux distribution (OpenSuSE 11.3).
You will find plenty of documentation at theVirtualBox.org Technical Documentation page.
The installation is pretty easy, but you must remember to manually add the users who will access Virtual Box to the special user group vboxusers. This can easily be done in OpenSuSe by using the security and users option of Yast.
Using Windows under Virtual Box
I installed under Virtual Box only Windows XP because my main purpose was to create an integrated Desktop environment where I could easily access both Linux and Windows applications
One important requirement for a good integration is to have the possibility to access from Windows also Linux directories because this allows to transfer data between the two environments.
Unfortunately this is not very simple to achieve. Virtual Box allows to declare Shared Folders which can be accessed from both Linux (host operating system) and Windows (guest operating systems). I declared my Linux home directory as a shared folder, but when I started Windows the shared folder was not visible in the explorer. This issue and its solution will be better explained in a separate point.