Looking for a free way to run Windows or LInux on an Intel Mac? Want one that is free?
VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Commercial alternatives include VMSWare Fusion and Parallels.
In order to run VirtualBox on your machine, you need:
- Reasonably powerful x86 hardware. Any recent Intel or AMD processor should do.
- Memory. Depending on what guest operating systems you want to run, you will need at least 512 MB of RAM (but probably more, and the more the better). Basically, you will need whatever your host operating system needs to run comfortably, plus the amount that the guest operating system needs. So, if you want to run Windows XP on Windows XP, you probably won’t enjoy the experience much with less than 1 GB of RAM. If you want to try out Windows Vista in a guest, it will refuse to install if it is given less than 512 MB RAM, so you’ll need that for the guest alone, plus the memory your operating system normally needs.
- Hard disk space. While VirtualBox itself is very lean (a typical installation will only need about 30 MB of hard disk space), the virtual machines will require fairly huge files on disk to represent their own hard disk storage. So, to install Windows XP, for example, you will need a file that will easily grow to several GB in size.
- A supported host operating system. Presently, we support Windows (primarily XP) and many Linux distributions on 32-bit hosts and on 64-bit hosts. Support for Mac OS X and Solaris and OpenSolaris appeared in 1.6.
- A supported guest operating system. Besides the user manual (see below), up-to-date information is available at “Status: Guest OSes“.
[Editor's Note: I haven't tried this yet, but plan to do so in the near future.]
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