I've done quite a bit of work over the past year with PC-hosted Linux (Ubuntu) VMs under VMWare Player, mainly for Android work. I got so fed up recently with the poor system integration (poor Mouse and Keyboard transitioning when moving to/from host and the VM, no copy/paste between Windows and the VM, limited support for VM desktop resizing, not easy to share file data between host and VM), that I decided to spend some time looking at VirtualBox.
After a day evaluating, I've now moved entirely to VirtualBox! I was even able to (easily) set-up 64-bit VMs running on 32-bit Windows, which was very handy; and it was simple to set-up a shared file area between host and VM.
I haven't yet tried VirtualBox on Mac, but I'm perfectly happy with Parallels 5 at the moment so haven't felt the need to use anything else on Mac...
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I told you it was good! :-))
A couple of questions for you ... :)
On Mac:
- Does VirtualBox allow you to resize to run fullscreen in a Spaces window...? ... or do you have to run with a border?
- From VirtualBox, do you have to nominate a shared folder for two-way file sharing (which, I guess, could be the root of the Mac drive!)?
Before I forget ... I presume that you can't boot into the VM (which is an option with BootCamp/Parallels...)? No big deal on that point, as I'm happier keeping them separate... just interested to know what the answer is. :)
A couple of answers
- Does VirtualBox allow you to resize to run fullscreen in a Spaces window...? ... or do you have to run with a border?
Not sure 'cos I'm still on Tiger but I'd guess you need the border because there are indicators and useful shortcuts to various aspects of the VM (like USB device management)
- From VirtualBox, do you have to nominate a shared folder for two-way file sharing
Yes, but a better approach is to have the Mac desktop mounted as a drive (Z) in XP running in the VM. That way you can access the Mac file system via the File menu in any XP application. So, when I was making DLS stuff in Music Producer I could just snag the wav files straight from the Mac system.
You can't boot into the VM. You also can't use your BootCamp installation in the VM - you have o make a VM and then do a clean XP install into that.
Peripheral management is pretty good. I was able to get XP to see my USB keyboard as a midi input device so could use it to audition patches in Music Producer.
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