As a developer I love testing out the new Open Source operating environments to see how they work and to just play around with them. I am always looking for something to replace Windows, but have never decided to replace it as my main desktop OS. I refuse to make the move to a Ubuntu or Fedora system mainly out of fear. The fear is that I won’t be able to preform all the task I need to and/or I will loose some data in the conversion because of my lack of backing up my system.

Now with VirtualBox , a product recently acquired by Sun Microsystems, I have the ability to run many different version of Linux, Windows, ect that I want, in virtual machines under the Microsoft Operating system. This tool not only allows you to run different virtual operating systems in Windows, but also does the same thing in Linux and Mac OS X systems as well..

So how neat is this? I can can create many different Linux Distributions that are easily started in the Windows operating system, without needing to create multiple boot partitions on my hard disk. The system has many cool features and advantages like:

1. The ability to create virtual hard disks
2. Ability to mount iso CD-ROM images as CD-ROM Drives
3. Ability to map network from windows to linux virtual os
4. Ability to setup a shared folder so you can share files between installations
5. Ability to have dynamically resided hard disks
6. Ability to get install/remove a OS without having to repartition hard disk

I have been having a lot of fun testing out Ubunta on my Windows XP laptop. The install went great, and everything was recognized without a problem. If you are looking to play around with different OS’s then give this neat piece of Open Source software a shot.