Seamlessly
Posted on October 5, 2008
14 Comments
The other day, I “tweeted“
you know how mac users have Parallels in “coherence” mode to run XP seamlessly in a VM? I want that for my linux machine. Suggestions?
Well, as is often the case, I asked before actually looking. Five minutes later I realized that VirtualBox has what I’m after in “Seamless Mode”. It rocks, check out this image:
(click for full size)
Check out that screenshot from my “ops laptop” (I didn’t get a netbook yet). Top bar is from Xubuntu, that’s the Xubuntu software updater to the left. Over on the right is Paint.net and that’s the XP bar along the bottom.
Pretty easy to do, too. Just hit the menu option in VirtualBox:
Here’s the odd thing though: I found out about seamless mode from forums and blog posts — not the main VirtualBox site.. There really isn’t much about it there. I mean, the word “seamless” appears on the About page.. but boy, I think this is a feature they should be shouting about from the rooftops! It makes working with virtual machines so much more pleasant.
There are two editions of VirtualBox and I’m currently running the “closed source” version as it comes in binary form (compiled) and can be used for eval. I’m not sure if seamless mode is in the open source version. Right now I’m using this for personal / eval use but it’s very possible I might want to use it for work next, so I’ll have to ponder the wording on that editions page some more.
All in all, I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen so far. For home use, this is very likely going to replace my VMware Server / VMware Player uses.
Tags: VirtualBox, virtualization, vmware, xubuntu
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14 Responses to “Seamlessly”
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Haven’t tried it with SP3 here. My...
Does it run slowly with VirtualBox running alongside Xubuntu? Or since you are using XFCE it runs fine.
Hey Kaleb, it actually runs quite nice.
In the current setup, XP is my Host OS with VirtualBox installed. I have Xubuntu installed as the guest and then running seamless mode. Xubuntu has 512MB (which is overkill). The host has 2 GB total so memory definitely not an issue yet.
Performance on this laptop’s older Centrino (1.4) has been just fine so far… but I haven’t really pushed working both OS’s hard at the same time yet.
Wow, that’s pretty slick. I’ve looked for stuff like that before when I was running Ubuntu as my primary OS. I don’t think my single core T42 has enough horsepower to run the VM alongside Ubuntu, but definitely worth it on a newer machine.
Supposedly, you can do something similar with RDP on Ubuntu, but I’ve never been able to get it to work.
@David, give it a shot. I’m finding that things are working quite well on my 1.40 GHz centrino…
@David: My friend and I accomplished this the RDP+Virtual Box way last year and it took way to much processing power. I will definitely look into this.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=433359
http://venturecake.com/10-minutes-to-run-every-windows-app-seamlessly-on-your-ubuntu-desktop/
Was this really easy to setup? I would love to do this same thing on Vista with XP. Since I can’t connect to work’s VPN in Vista, I have to run XP in VMWare. I would prefer this over using VMWare, but afraid of a huge amount of learning and/or tweaking.
I’ve been wanting seamless mode for a while!
@Alisha - it was really really easy to setup.
Install VirtualBox.
Create new guest and install XP. (when creating new guess you can point the CD drive at your “real” CD drive or an ISO image if you have XP as an ISO).
Install VirtualBox client tools
Check the “Seamless mode” box.
Done!
Awesome! Thanks for sharing, I’m going to try this out before I have to work. No more feeling like I’m trapped in a window!
Thank you so much for mentioning VirtualBox! I am in love with seamless mode! Now I actually feel like I’m connected to the VPN and doing work on Vista, instead of feeling like I have to run another machine (even though right now I see XP’s ugly fisher price appearance).
To make it even more seamless, I tried setting auto-hide on the guest taskbar, but it doesn’t auto-hide unless I have a guest window active. Hopefully there is or will be a fix for that.
Other than that, everything works perfectly!
Bye bye VMWare!
Sorry for another comment. I just wanted to update that I can’t use VirtualBox for work. The company’s application won’t even run (it requires the .NET framework v2 I think, even though Paint.NET runs just fine but with a newer .NET framework version.)
So, I searched around for another virtual machine with seamless mode and it turns out the newer version of VMWare (6.5) does have this, but called Unity. It’s a little slower, but it allows me to use the host’s taskbar.
Stuck with VMWare for now.
Hrmm, that’s really odd. I run several .NET framework apps up to 3.5 and haven’t had any issues running them in a vbox. :-\
The VMware that you mentioned, is that a new version of the free Player or is that the full commercial version? If a freebie, I’ll definitely give it a look just cause I’m a virtual machine junkie
Oh, wow, maybe my install of .NET framework is just corrupt or work’s application is just not VirtualBox friendly (which is probably the case).
VMWare Workstation 6.5 has Unity mode, but I don’t know if the free player actually supports it. I didn’t see anything mention this (although look at the link below). Mostly after I read about the new feature in someone’s comment, I quickly opened up VMWare.
I did find this though: http://www.vmware.com/support/player25/doc/releasenotes_player25.html
Doh. VMware has this stuff too? Hmmph, looks like I have something else to play with soon!