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quick question on virtual box

Asked by Joel Stein

I hate to waste your time with a silly question but I have been unable to find this out. I use windows primarily for i tunes and a few other things that won't work with linux. Will all these programs run on windows 7 VB on a computer with Ubuntu 14.04 as the host?

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Manfred Hampl
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Best Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

Any guest system inside a virtualbox environment on any host system behaves almost the same as if that operating system is natively installed. There are a few drawbacks: you have a reduced amount of memory available, and running the virtualbox executable and the host operating system needs some overhead, so the available processing power of the CPU is also lower. Accessing peripherals in some cases needs specific configuration that might be tricky, respectively accessing peripheral devices from within Linux might be not possible at all if they need specific Windows drivers and there are no native Linux drivers available.

Why not just trying whether it works? Just install the virtualbox package, create a virtual machine from your windows installation CD/DVD, and that's it. If you do not like it, just delete the VM and uninstall virtualbox, and you are back to the status as before.

Microsoft even provides prebuilt VM files (for testing different versions of the internet explorer), see https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools that can serve well for testing how Windows XP/Vista/7/8 looks and feels inside a virtualbox environment.

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Joel Stein (ticktockman) said : 		#2

Thanks for the info. The only reason I was hesitating is that I don't have a windows 7 disc. My only windows computer came with windows previously installedOEM. I think I'll go ahead, spend the hundred bucks and see how it works. Thanks again.