Seamless Virtualization in Virtual Box
This last week Innotek released Virtualbox 1.5 which is a major move forward for this free virtualization system. One of the best features is the easy to use implementation of seamless virtualization. It allows the user to integrate their two operating systems in one nice interface. While this is not a new concept as Parallels has been doing it for a while, it is new to a free, cross platform application (to the best of my knowledge).
To get it up and running all I had to do was update my VirtualBox install and then press “Host(Ctrl) + L”. Next thing you know your Windows task bar will appear at the bottom of your desktop(I moved mine to the top). You are now free to access windows applications as if they where a GTK application. There is one thing that doesn’t work smoothly as of yet. It appears that Beryl/Compiz style compositing applications don’t get a long so well with this seamless integration. It is hard to say who is at fault in this case but I am sure it will be resolved in due time. Until then I am happy dealing with the problem or simply turning off Beryl.