Installation of both operating systems was flawless. I gave VirtualBox a spin with both Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 7.10 guests. VirtualBox supports an impressive range of guest systems. These are called Guest Additions, and work in much the same way as Parallels Tools and VMware Tools – you get smooth graphics and mouse performance, as well as the ability to resize the guest desktop simply by resizing the VM window.Ĭreating a new VM. VirtualBox includes tools for both Windows and Linux guests. VirtualBox supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including most flavours of Windows, many Linux distros, FreeBSD, DOS and even NetWare. For the purposes of this review I tested the PUEL edition. It also has more features than the GPL edition at the time of writing, including USB support and an RDP server for remote access (here’s a full list of the differences). The latter is free as in beer, provided of course it’s just for personal use or evaluation purposes. VirtualBox actually comes in two flavours: an open-source GPL edition, and a proprietary “VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL)” edition.

To be fair, the Mac version only came out of beta at the start of this month – at least, that’s my excuse! – and this is the version I’ll review here. I confess that I’ve been blissfully unaware of VirtualBox, despite it being around for a couple of years. My recent comparison of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion attracted a lot of comments, many of which pointed out a third, free virtualization app for the Mac: VirtualBox.

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