Freedom Creations

Posts Tagged ‘VirtualBox’

There will come a point where you will want to test your site on another browser that your OS does not support or run an Apache server to install a CMS. For instance, if you are using a Linux based OS or MAC OS and you want to test out your site on Internet Explorer 8.0 (IE8), you are out of luck. In this case you will certainly need a virtual machine to address the missing link. The virtual platform of choice is VirtualBox.

VirtualBox

Virtualbox is owned by Sun Microsystems (which in return is owned by Oracle). VirtualBox is free under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It works on all three platforms, Windows, MAC OS and Linux. It is pretty much a breeze to install on each platform so I’m not even going to write on how to install it. As of this writing, the latest version is 3.0.4.

Why am I recommending VirtualBox? Here’s why:

1. It installs easy on each platform.
2. I find it to run faster than other virtual systems, like VMWare Server.
3. It offers a lot of features that you would normally have to pay for on other virtual software.
4. It supports USB 2.0.
5. I can port my virtual machines very easily. I haven’t tried this with other virtual software but with VirtualBox it works great. I create my drive on a portable HD and run the virtual OS from there. I can then use the same drive to run the virtual OS from another computer with VirtualBox. It all works seamlessly.

A great tool to have in your Web Development kit.

So what’s the best way to set up your computer for web development?  Regardless, you are going to want to have two OSs installed.  Let’s start with the Apple computers.

On a MAC you can install another Intel based OS using Boot Camp or a virtualization product within the MAC OS.  I prefer the latter.

There are many virtualization products for the MAC; some are free and some are paid (I will be going through the different options on a later post).  The most popular used on the MAC is Parallels.  I like VirtualBox which is free (I will be going through the VirtualBox installation on a later post.)  Whatever virtualization product you use the second OS installed, should be Windows XP.  If you have the juice (4GB of RAM) you can install Windows Vista.  Also if you have the capacity you can install Ubuntu too.  That’s the recommended OS setup on the MAC.

On a PC if you have a 80GB or less hard drive, I recommend you install Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) as the main OS and virtualize Windows XP or Vista.  I recommend the latest version of Ubuntu which is 8.04 LTS.  You can find instructions on how to install Ubuntu at Ubuntu and also another great site HowtoForge. Read the rest of this entry »