kallasoft

You might have noticed that VirtualBox 2.1.2 has been released into the wild. While there is a laundry list of changes, a few performance and stability enhancements for Mac OS X were on the top of want my list.

While Parallels and VMWare offer commercial solutions, Sun backed VirtualBox offers many similar features for free. As mentioned before, however, stability issues have kept me from using it on my Macbook. After having some time to play with this new .1.2 update, I’ve found that most of my previous issues have been resolved. I haven’t experienced random crashes, and I was successfully able to boot OpenSolaris 8.11, Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, SymphonyOne, and PC-BSD with no hiccups. I even managed to get through almost all of the ESXi bootup disk (a task that would fail within seconds before)!

I have been very happy with VMPlayer on my Linux boxes, but felt the lack of a viable free solution for Mac OS X. After a couple of hours, I think I can safely say that Sun contributed greatly to this very impressive, and free, application. I also wasn’t too disappointed in speed considering my Macbook didn’t grind to a halt when starting up Majong. So, if you need a quick virtualization setup that has all the tools to get a guest system installed in one go, then you might want to try VirtualBox.

Check out the latest release, and let us know what you think! Here are some of the screen shots from my experience: