Briefly About the Show

The very best weekly mash-up of technology, advice, and humor. Hosts Shane Elliott and Scott Hoffman hold nothing back as they candidly review weekly tech news, gaming, the web, design, and much more. Yes, it's time to talk about technology in a way that might actually help you. It's candid, it's funny, and it's down right sexy. Check in and download your weekly dose of awesome!

 

« Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar | Main | Leopard looks like Vista? In Crazy Land »

Free Open-Source Virtualization for OS X

Since Parallels came out with Desktop for Mac, virtualization has been a huge topic in computing circles. Parallels was the first company to let you install and run Windows from within OS X with little to no performance hit. Following Parallel's lead, VMWare launched the public beta of their competing Fusion product.

Even though these products do some amazing things, people often complain about having to pay for them on top of having to purchase a license of the OS they plan to install. Considering what these apps do, I think it's a silly complaint, personally. But now it may be an issue of the past.

Innotek has announced a Mac version of its VirtualBox virtualization software. This time though, the product is based on open-source code and is the first professional virtualization product being made available free of charge to the Apple Macintosh platform.

The product supports a wide variety of x86 compatible guest operating system such as: various versions of Windows from NT to Vista, DOS, OpenBSD and Linux. Features include USB support, snapshots and command-line scripting.

The OS X version is currently available in its first public beta version and is based on VirtualBox's new version 1.4 codebase. The product is expected to be completed in the 2nd quarter of 2007.

So if you have the need for virtualization software, but haven't been able to justify the extra cost, this may be the time to give VirtualBox a try. After you give it a try, write us and let us know how it performs. Especially if you have one of the competing products and you can give us some details on your comparisons.

Story from InfoWorld

Posted by ZeroLogik on April 30, 2007 9:27 PM |

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)