Missives from the 6th Floor

I had read about VirtualBox a while back, and was happy to see that Ubuntu had ready-made packages for the open source version - a couple clicks later, and I was wandering through the VM creation wizard, putting my XP CD into a drive, and watching Windows install.

A short while later, I installed the VPN client, and was on the work LAN. Elapsed time: about an hour - technical kung-fu needed: none.

That's right. None. It just worked.

I was amazed. It's got nearly all the features you'd expect from a virtualization solution - and the closed source (but still free for personal use) version includes several nice-to-haves. The one missing feature is 3d acceleration (which both VMWare and Parallels offer).

The problem with my notebook seems to be that the thermal paste on the GPU failed, the GPU was temperature spiking and the machine was turning off. I'll bring it to work on Monday and let the IT guys see if they can fix it up for me.