Friday, January 2, 2009

VirtualBox on Acer Aspire One

I'd started to install VMware on my Aspire One (Linux), when I came across
macles* post on VirtualBox. In a couple of hours I had it up and running, with Windows XP as the guest OS, nice.

When reading about VirtualBox, the thing that excited me most was the support for USB devices - ie. it can 'pipe' them through to the guest OS, such that devices not supported in the host OS can be used in the guest OS... nice.

So I gave it a try - first was my HP Laserjet M1005 MFP, printer and scanner - no problems. Install the drivers (in XP), plug in the device, tell VirtualBox to enable it, XP detects it and out comes the test page. Similarly for the Scanner. Mounting ISO images of CDs (eg. install CDs) works beautifully too, something XP itself isn't so good at.

Then the Sony Ericsson P1i PC suite. This is a buggy thing to start with... I can no longer get it to install on my Vista work PC, how about XP under VirtualBox? Basically, no problems! I may have to run VirtualBox on my Vista laptop too :)

It's really nice when things work so well.

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