I use Oracle’s VirtualBox to run VM’s on my Windows 7 machine. I use it for web site development with WordPress, Drupal and have several tools to support this, such as Git, NetBeans, Samba and so forth. Unlike VMWare Player, VirtualBox provides Snapshots, which allow you to quickly backup and restore your VM.
I’ve been trying different versions of Ubuntu and Mint to find out which works best with VirtualBox (for me) and am finding that Linux Mint with Mate seems to be coming out on top.
- Ubuntu 12.04 worked OK, that is, until you applied patches. Sometimes, re-installing the Guest Additions fixed any graphics issues, and sometimes they didn’t.
- Ubuntu 12.10 required patches in order to work with VirtualBox at all.
- Ubuntu 12.04 kind of worked with the seamless mode, but then again, it kind of didn’t.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon was problematic graphic wise with VirtualBox.
- Linux Mint with Mate seemed to work the best. It survived updates and the seamless mode works like a charm. In addition, it uses the same ‘apt-get’ features of Ubuntu.
- I haven’t spent much time with Ubuntu 13.04, but did have some initial installation/graphics issues with it.
Unless something else comes up, I’m switching over to Mint for my LAMP development environment.
Comments are closed.