Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager

Today I 'ave mainly been thinking about VirtualBox.

For several years I have felt it would be useful to have a basic linux box so that I could be in a more standard "work" type environment. OS X is fine but some things are just different.

I had been advised that VirtualBox was an option to load a linux OS onto my Mac and run it in parallel with OS X in its own window.

So I downloaded version 4.2.18 and was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to install from a downloaded iso image.

I started with Centos because I was using this at work. However this turned out to be very disappointing. The installation went fine but it always hung up while downloading upgrades. This was annoying because I had several attempts that all ended in failure.

Anyway not put off too much I downloaded ubuntu. This installed fine and managed to upgrade its self but ultimately this was also very disappointing as it ran dog slow (no offence to dogs intended). I think it was the fancy graphics. This was so bad that I gave up for a few weeks.

After chatting to a couple of mates I decided to have one last try with xubuntu. I picked the latest LTS version 12.04.3. And yippee it worked. It installed quickly, it updated quickly, I installed guest additions for virtual box from the package manager, it came with python 2.7.3. I have started working on it it does not seem to slow my mac down and it runs fast enough. I like the user interface. I even loaded my own copy of sublime text 2!

Result!