VirtualBox is a free virtual machine environment that runs on the major platforms. Competitors include Parallels, VirtualPC, and VMWare, all great products. The VirtualBox project was acquired by Sun a while back and it’s still free and better than ever.
In Mac OS X I had started with Parallels and also used VMWare Fusion since BeOS, Zeta, and Haiku didn’t ever work for me in Parallels. Installing VirtualBox in Ubuntu was a snap. I love Ubuntu and APT installations. It handled all the messy kernel configuration stuff for me. I did notice some strange double entries for network interfaces until I rebooted the next time, but all was well.
One of my favorite things is the BeOS and its successors. I even made a go of switching to Zeta a while back. I’m probably one of the few people you know that bought a Zeta pre-release, Zeta 1.2, and the quickly-unavailable 1.5. Quickly unavailable because it turned out the company never had the legal right to the code they were messing with that had been created by Be, Inc. and sold when that company went under. Anyway, ever since Be went under a daring and dedicated gang of coders around the world have been struggling to build an open source successor to the BeOS, which has been named Haiku. It’s awesome and will be on my desktop in a couple of years I predict. Currently, there are just too many apps I need to do my job that haven’t been ported yet.
Anyway, I wanted to port my VMWare images over to continue using them in Linux. The Haiku version I had was pretty old so I just download the latest VMWare hard drive image from the haiku-os.org site and easily created a new virtual machine for the latest Haiku. Works great.
Using the instructions from the Ubuntu Tutorials page, I migrated my Zeta virtual machine but didn’t have the patience for it to finish loading. The bootup happened and it even asked if the time had changed but never actually came up. I suspect it will take more tweaking, but getting Zeta 1.5 running isn’t critical and if it was I could install the Linux version of VMWare.