Notes on VirtualBox

[darose-prQxUZoa2zOsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org (David Rosenstrauch)]

On 04/18/2010 02:26 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> Would love to hear others' comments.
>
> -rich

Yup.  I've been using VB for several years now and have similarly found 
it to be excellent.


I haven't used VMWare in anger in a long time.  But when I did have to 
use it (VMW Player) recently, the things that stood out to me about it 
that was very inferior to VB was a) the closed source aspect of it, and 
b) the installation process.

Since it's closed source, there's obviously no package for it available 
via my distro.  And installation basically consisted of letting the 
installer - running as root, mind you! - do whatever it wanted to my system.

At best, my package manager had no knowledge of which files it 
installed, which is annoying.  At worst, the installer could have 
completely hosed my system, compromised its security, etc., and I would 
have had no idea what it did, or why, and so no idea how to fix it.

I put up with such things under Windows, but I refuse to do so under 
Linux - especially when there's an open source app with the same 
functionality that works as good (if not better).

DR