VirtualBox 2.10
January 2nd, 2009I’ve just tried VirtualBox 2.10 and their support for Fedora hosts has much improved. In the past I had problems running Fedora 10 in full screen mode due to Xorg 1.5 being shipped with Fedora 10. Now it works flawlessly along with the dynamic resizing and mouse capture support.
The main problem I still have is with seamless mode. When I tried this out I could only see a small patch of the client in a window in the middle of my host desktop so I was unable to even shutdown the machine.
I was running VirtualBox on a laptop with a P8600 2.4 GHz processor and 2GB or RAM, I allocated 768MB of RAM to the Fedora client and it actually runs much faster than natively on my old laptop with 512MB of RAM. In fact with it running full screen you would not know that it was not the host OS as it runs so well.
With many laptops now shipping with 4GB of RAM I can easily see the time when there’s no need to set up a dual boot environment but just use virtualisation instead. The main problem is with hardware support, for example accessing built in webcams and other laptop specific devices.
Update – I just tried seamless mode again and it worked perfectly so maybe the problem was an intermittent one, I hope so anyway.