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Anybody tried this?
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
I used a Dell Latitude D630 with Mandriva Linux. It comes preloaded on the distro. I installed Win XP and ran it at the same time with Mandriva 2009.1
Runs great !
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There are others available. Qemu is used on a few: Q for Mac, VirtualBox, Xen. There si also VMWare, Parallels, VirtualIron, KVM, Kqemu.
As posted before, was on a Dell Latitude D630 and that is a Laptop. It does runs fine as long you do not do some that is intensive.
The reason why I did it was, Netflix is very anal about Linux. Can not view movies online from that site.
But if you load MS on Virtual Box, you can run the OS without rebooting to MS and fire up IE to watch the movies.
Now, how cool is that !
Did you enable the flashplugin and the java plugin for your distribution?
If you meant able to watch Flash / Java anything on MS is just like having a MS system. Linux does not really care how MS sees the data. The Virtual Box fools the OS that is by itself providing the connection with the Hardware. So you can see, hear and move files via network.
The only "problem" is the one on the OS is a free version and the USB is disable, so you can not read thumb drives or media devices. Is not broken, just that you have to pay for the real version with all the bells and whistles.
The advantage is that you still installing from CD/DVD whatever you wish. Never tried a resource demanding application like a game, so I do not know for sure how far can I push it. I would assume is limited by the hardware running 2 OSs but other than that, runs great.
If you want MS games in Linux, get Cedega. Is a MS "emulator" geared for gaming.
The gentoo wiki has a section on how to use usb devices in the free ose version of virtualbox. Archlinux also has some documentation.
No, I mean using native flash and java plugins on the Linux system.
Cedega is supported professionally. there are tutorials on using wine for games.
Other emulation options you can use- if you want to run more than one instance of a virtual machine- are qemu ( with kqemu or kvm) and Xen. The limitation is dependent upon the cpu flags. There are native versions of some games available for linux. Some are free, others cost money.
You may want to check the software repositories for streaming media.
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