Sun Microsystems has announced the first beta release of VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1. The major additions to VirtualBox 3.0 so far is guest SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) support for up to 32 virtual CPUs, Windows guests now support Direct3D 8/9 applications and games, and there is now OpenGL 2.0 support for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests.

I noticed a while back that the VirtualBox OS window is set to transparent in some cases when Compiz is also running (a lot of users have reported this, though it's not happening for everyone).

I’m running a few Ubuntu virtual machines for testing new software. My favorite virtualization software, VirtualBox, is much easier to use with the additional drivers (called “Guest Additions”) that allow higher screen resolutions, better display performance, and mouse integration. For Ubuntu 8.04 guests, I had some issues installing the guest additions using VirtualBox 1.5.6 OSE.

Virtualbox 1.6, which was released in May 2, was the first major release since Sun took over virtualbox. All I can say is Wow!! This is perhaps the single biggest, most important open source release which will change the face of how computers are used for years to come. Hell this is even bigger than the release of hardy heron (IMO), and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was a very important release.

Sun xVM VirtualBox software is the world's most popular open source virtualization platform because of its fast performance, ease of use, rich functionality, and modular design.

VirtualBox 1.6 is a major update, incorporating over 2000 improvements. Among the highlights:

* The new Sun livery
* Solaris and Mac versions no longer in beta
* Guest Additions for Solaris
* Seamless windowing for Solaris and Linux guests
* SATA support for up to 32 hard disks per VM (first product in the industry to do SATA!)
* PAE support for guests (memory model required by some server OSes)
* Web Services API for remote management
* Significant improvements to scalability

From Techthrob.com:

Virtualization is the technique of running a "guest" operating system inside an already-running OS; for example, Windows inside Linux, or visa-versa. This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. This article compares four virtualization products available for Ubuntu Linux: the free, open source Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the newly-available, commercial Parallels.

Read More at Techthrob.com

I’m going to outline today how to setup seamless window integration with Ubuntu and Virtualbox. If you missed yesterday’s post you might want to take a look at the seamless integration screenshot. No, that is not Photoshop’d, its really my desktop. I’ll also outline how to setup a shared folder between the two systems so that the icons and folders available on your XP desktop are available on your Ubuntu dekstop. So lets go ahead and dive in.

VirtualBox is a piece of software that uses virtualisation to simulate a PC. With it you can run Windows, Open BSD or even Linux from your Debian system. Since it also runs on Windows and Mac OS, you can use it to run Debian from that other non-free OS. Note however that it only works on x86 and x86_64 hosts.

If you're like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you're already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to mount your USB devices in your virtual machines. Well, maybe there are lots of things that are more frustrating but this morning my inability to do something that should be simple, easy and fun was driving me nuts.

So I figured out how to do it. It’s not terribly pretty but here’s what you need to do.

As promised in my previous post on installing VirtualBox Open Source Edititon today I’ll be going over installing the Guest Addition tools for better integration between host and guest. These steps have not been tested on other Linux distributions but I’m sure they’ll work about the same way. I tested these on Kubuntu 7.04 running atop Kubuntu 7.10 beta as the host.

I’ve previously written on how to install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10, install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.04 and install VMware Tools, but installing VirtualBox has a few of its own benefits. One, it is actually Open Source / Free Software whereas VMware is freeware. This is very important to a lot of people, myself included.

Intel VT-x is a set of processor enhancements to improve virtualization performance. In theory, VT-x should allow for near-native speed in a virtual machine. VirtualBox, a popular open source virtualization program, recently added a check box to turn on VT-x or AMD’s AMD-V equivalent. But VirtualBox’s site warns that enabling it may reduce the performance of a virtual machine:

Innotek rolled out a significant update to its VirtualBox open source virtualization software this week. According to Achim Hasenmueller, managing director of innotek, the release of VirtualBox 1.5.0 for Windows and Linux marks the first time seamless windowing -- the ability to display a single Windows application on a Linux desktop -- is available for Linux systems.

VirtualBox is open source virtualization software similar to VMware. I wanted to run a virtual Ubuntu LAMP server for testing, but I ran into a problem with VirtualBox.