I am a professional computer scientist, and my workstation and laptop run
CentOS, a GPL clone of Red Hat Enterprise -- currently CentOS 5.
I use these as tools, not toys, and need a stable production environment.
Unfortunately, certain applications only exist for MS Win, and certain web
sites require MS Inet Exploder to display correctly. I do not want to dual
boot any machine; thus, I have been using VMWare Workstation (current 6.x) to
run MS Win (currently MS Win XP Pro SP 2) in a sandbox, but with full access to
the Internet (via the linux host) and to the actual peripherals (including a
Palm PDA via USB).
Because VIrtualBox non-pro is open source, I have been experimenting with
VirtualBox Pro (almost the same except for a few
added features, such as USB) under the educational license as a replacement for
VMWare Workstation and also under consideration to recommend to my students who
have the same problems because of the monopoly.
Unfortunately, as of now, I cannot attest that VirtualBox current is ready for
prime time production use. I cannot get the USB to work properly under it, and
it crashes on some applications. For example, I was just trying to use Nikon
Capture NX under MS Win XP under VirtualBox, and MS Win XP crashed. This
reminds me of the behavior of VMware Workstation a number of major releases
back. I suspect that with additional debugging/extending, VirtualBox will work
as well as VMWorkstation. If anyone at VirtualBox wants to offer support
hints, I am willing to provide whatever information I can from my machine.
I will continue to "play" with it; but for now, back to VMWare Workstation for
production use.
Again, I prefer the open source model -- but a production tool must work or it
is simply not useful as a tool.
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