On Mon, 28 Jun 2010, Jason Hsu, embedded engineer, Linux user wrote: > Is there any good reason to dual boot Windows given the option of > installing Windows in VirtualBox? I haven't tried VirtualBox yet, but > it sounds awesome - being able to try out various operating systems > without having to burn CDs and without having to dedicate a whole > partition to Windows or another guest OS. > > The only drawback I can think of is the increased RAM and processor > speed requirements (due to the need to run both the host OS and guest OS > simultaneously). > > (In case you're wondering, the only thing I've done in Windows that I > haven't found a Linux/open source substitute for is working with a > Xilinx FPGA kit.) I used Windows XP in VirtualBox for a year or so. It was pretty great. I got almost everything to work properly. I think USB wasn't working in Windows, but I probably could have figured it out -- I think it normally works for people. One major problem: It took down my Ubuntu system once. I used to just leave it running in an IceWM workspace under RealVNC, but sometimes I wouldn't use it for weeks at a time. This meant it wasn't rebooted. Various things can grow stale with Windows over time and at some point it severely messed up everything to the point where I couldn't even look at process statuses. After almost a whole day of trying to make it work, I had to take it down and reboot the whole system. Without Windows running in VirtualBox, I've had the same VNC session running since October 2009 when I last upgraded Ubuntu to 9.10. I'll probably get back to using VirtualBox with WinXP again, but I won't leave it running when I don't need it. The only thing I think I need it for is for certain Office documents that OpenOffice just doesn't handle correctly. Those documents are pretty rare these days and OpenOffice is doing a nice enough job most of the time. Mike