VirtualBox

It's difficult to be around tech these days and not have heard about virtualization. VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ is one of the products that brings virtualization to the desktop.

I used to use VMware player. Once I was introduced to VirtualBox I switched all of my systems to use it. It's easy to install and manage and you get a great range of capabilities with the one product. VirtualBox has a great community of users that makes getting support relatively easy. It runs on most all popular platforms and extends your capabilities as a tech professional.

I run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as my host system with Virtualbox running Win 7, two installs of Win XP pro, Fedora 14, CentOS6, Linux Mint, Open SUSE, and most recently Free BSD. I use these virtual machines to test scripts, applications, and browser comparability with web application that I'm developing. I also use them to develop and test platform specific deployments of server side products.

In addition to test environments I use virtual machines to give me some capability that another OS or distribution can't, and I'll just try out some new tech toy or tool that I couldn't do easily without having access to a full boot partition or even another box. For instance, I'm trying out Linux Mint with XFCE.

Coupling all of the base capability to the great tools the VirtualBox folks deliver in the guest additions and then capping it off with seamless mode the software opens up many learning and professional doors that would be difficult or expensive without access to the virtual machine.

Give it a try. I'm sure you'll get a kick out of it!