UbuntuXP


I run Ubuntu Linux on my desktop and laptop here at my office/home and I really enjoy using it, but as a web developer I need to create websites that work in more than just Firefox on Linux. While I have a membership at BrowserCam, it is much faster sometimes to be able to do a quick check of a website on a system here in my office. The only problem is, I don’t have that many computers to run all the different versions of Windows. The solution to that problem is to have one computer and run multiple operating systems on one computer. That is where VirtualBox comes in. I installed VirtualBox on my Ubuntu system a while ago, when I just needed to have some features of Photoshop to work properly, and ever since then I have been wanting to run Windows XP in what is called seamless mode. I followed the guide over at the Ubuntu Forums but I had no luck. I could not get the system to go seamless. I had given up on it until the other day when I StumbledUpon the VirtualBox website again and noticed news that a new version had been released. I checked the news and sure enough VirtualBox now supported seamless mode right out of the box. No messing around with the Windows registry or using rdesktop. Just start up the Windows virtual machine and press the VirtualBox host key (in my case Right Control) and L and presto it magically goes into seamless mode. Sweet!

Here is a little video of me starting up Windows XP on my Ubuntu desktop and switching it into seamless mode. You can see the Ubuntu panel on the top and the Windows XP taskbar on the bottom. This comes in very useful for quickly checking websites on Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 and Safari. I will have to see what other browsers I can load on that virtual machine. (Sorry no sound on the video. Maybe I’ll edit it to add some music.)

Categories: tools 
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