Virtualbox - free solution for virtualization
18 December 2008 by oxyk
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products - the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
Why you might need to use Virtualbox? If you want to test new OS without reformatting your HDD, if you need to run 2 OSes side by side (like i do, linux for life and windows for photoshop and IEs :))
Installation of virtualbox is very simple. Download, install, run, enjoy!
Hot tips:
If you are using linux, after installation Virtualbox might ask for recompiling kernel:
/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
If you run some test sites on your linux Apache server, you might want to have access to it from guest OS (let’s say it’s windows)
to point Windows browser to the linux localhost:
ifconfig -a
find line with eth0 params, it can look like this:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:ef:d4:64:41:53
inet addr:10.102.3.97
Copy the inet address and use it in the guest OS browser.
For example http://10.102.3.97/ will be the same as localhost
For scripts that used to redirect user to predefined homepage (like wordpress does), you can use the IP adress instead of localhost. In this way the test site will be visible from linux and windows.
testing