When I was comparing Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 [virtualpcadditions, virtualpc2007] with the free VMWare Player virtual machine, I lamented having to decide between a polished, easy-to-use solution versus a powerful, yet clunky solution. But then I remembered that InnoTek recently made their VirtualBox virtual machine freely available for Linux and Windows hosts. I compared VirtualBox to Virtual PC 2007 and VMWare Player on my P4 Prescott machine, and with my totally unscientific asseement, I am quite impressed.
I installed the SimplyMEPIS and ZenWalk Linux distros under each virtual machine. Here are some usage notes for each:
DefaultDepth to be 16 instead of 24. Both MEPIS and ZenWalk detected VMWare and installed the VMWare video driver. Microsoft's Linux Additions video drivers didn't work properly in either distro.Inside of each distro's VM, I downloaded and compiled ppower, a compact and solid app used to control X10 serial devices. I timed the compilation on all three VMs. VirtualBox and VMWare came in at a dead heat, but both were nearly twice as fast as Virtual PC.
All in all, VirtualBox is almost as easy to use as Virtual PC 2007, but with better performance. It is my go-to virtual machine now.
Side Note: I repeatedly tried to download Parallels Workstation as another VM to use for comparison, but their web site is a disaster. It took several days before their user registration page would give me a trial code, but the link to download the product itself hasn't worked in weeks. I actually had to Google to find their user forum, as a link on their own site was nowhere to be found.
