VirtualBox is the virtualization tool with one GPL edition, as we speak bellow.
It is becaming as an attractive choice against VMware products, with propietary code philosophy.
VirtualBox was acquired on 2008 February by SUN Microsystems.
We can see in the following link http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions, that we have two VirtualBox Editions:
- The complete version, released with a special free licence for personal users.
- The Open Source Edition (OSE), GPL licensed. But without some useful functionalities, like the most interesting for me: boot mi old Windows XP from its partition.
The OSE (Open Source Edition) is at the Ubutu repositories. Install it is as easier as execute the following command:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose |
Opposite the 450MB VMWare-Server 2.0 Beta 2 size, with VirtualBox we download thre packages with less than 30MB size:
Se instalarán los siguientes paquetes NUEVOS: libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose 0 actualizados, 3 se instalarán, 0 para eliminar y 0 no actualizados. Necesito descargar 8997kB de archivos. Se utilizarán 29,8MB de espacio de disco adicional después de desempaquetar. |
Finally we find the launcher at Applications >System Tools, the non-last version of VirtualBox, la 1.5.6.
The complete version can be found at SUN repositories, where you can select your operating system and download the installation package.
It will be installed with GDebi, and we can create a launcher where we want with the command VirtualBox.
You can see my reference table:
| Origin | http://www.virtualbox.org/ |
| Repository | Commercial version aquí GPL version here, but choosing the package for your regular distro |
| Package | virtualbox_1.6.0-30421_Ubuntu_hardy_i386.deb |
| Documentation (English) | User Manual: http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.6.0/UserManual.pdf |