Best virtual machine?

[whatthefunk]

Im want to test out some other distros in virtual machines. Can anybody recommend a good one?

[Snowhog]

I use Oracle VM Virtualbox. I like it. I used to use VMware Player.

[Frank616]

Snowhog has mentioned both of the major ones. I use VMWare Player. I also own the full version of VMWare Workstation 8. That is way overkill for what I do, however.

Virtual Box is open source (mostly). VMWare is very much closed source. Both are free for personal use. My understanding is that VMWare Player has more features, but I'm not able to back that up.

There is also Qemu, but I've not used it in a LONG time.

The current version of Win4Lin IIUC is based on qemu, but is a commercial package with a few extra bells and whistles. It has been even longer since I used that.

Frank.

[SteveRiley]

I gave Qemu-KVM a go last month, along with the AQemu Qt-based front end. I found it difficult or impossible to configure features that I think are important for desktop virtualization: good USB support, PCI passthrough, drag-and-drop between guest and host, mapping the host drive into the guest, and acceptable guest graphics acceleration. KVM is supposed to support NIC bridging, where the VM appears on the LAN as an actual host, but I couldn't find out how to do that with the AQemu interface -- all I got was NAT.

Much of what I've read about KVM says it's designed for server virtualization; my few hours of fiddling confirms this, at least for me. I've been happy with VMware Player, mostly because of its Unity feature: guest VM windows appear as separate windows on the host display and in the host's task bar. You can make the guest OS "container" completely disappear. This is much better than VirtualBox's seamless mode, which simply expands the guest's main window to the same size as the host and then pushes the frame to the background.

Also, Oracle just gives me the heebie jeebies.

[whatthefunk]

Thanks for the input everyone. Ive got virtualbox up and running and have installed Ubuntu in it. Ive got a major resolution problem though....when on full screen mode, the Ubuntu window is half the size of my screen. is this a VB problem or a Ubuntu problem??

[gnomek]

Can you tell me if there is a virtual machine software that supports hardware for guest? I mean support, so that I can see in guest graphic card and TV card and print from guest and install appropriate drivers in guest.

[Frank616]

gnomek:

If I understand you correctly....

A VM virtualizes a 'plain vanilla' graphics system for the guest OS regardless of the actual hardware in the host machine. I don't know about a TV card. There may be a way to get the VM to give your guest OS virtual access to fancier hardware, but that is out of the realm of my experience.

As to printing from the guest OS, yes, that is entirely possible with VMWare Player, and probably any other decent VM. Drivers in the guest, IIUC, are installed when you add the 'tools' package for the virtualization software you are using.

If you are doing development where you need to virtualize some specific hardware and driver setup, then you may want to consider a full blown virtualization solution, like VMWare Workstation 8.

If I have not understood your request properly, then we'll let someone with more knowledge of VM products guide you further.

Frank.

[GreyGeek]

Thanks for the input everyone. Ive got virtualbox up and running and have installed Ubuntu in it. Ive got a major resolution problem though....when on full screen mode, the Ubuntu window is half the size of my screen. is this a VB problem or a Ubuntu problem??

Sounds like you didn't install the "Guest Additions", or the "Extension Pack".
http://www.linuxleech.com/tag/virtua...itions-ubuntu/

Executive summary: On the VB dialog click "Devices" and choose "Install Guest Additions".

[Snowhog]

Screen size of a VM Guest OS is also dependent on the amount of RAM you opted to use when the VM was created. The more RAM, the larger the Guest screen.