VirtualBox Makes It Easy to Use Other Operating Systems

One of the current ideas about computing is that the operating system is becoming less important. With many software applications and even your data in the cloud, most of the work that you do can be done in a browser, or so the idea goes. That’s not true for me. During I do use my e-mail and calendar in Google Apps, sync my most important files to the cloud with ProfHacker favorite Dropbox, and use any number of other web applications, I on the whole spend most of my computing time in my operating system using applications that can’t be run on a web service. For security and privacy reasons, which we’ve covered, you might not want much of your important in the cloud by all means.

One solution to this problem is to have your computer dual boot. This means that two operating systems, say Mac and Windows, live on your hard disk, and when you start the computer you can pick which one you want to run. Dual-booting has its downsides. It’s technically complex and not for the faint of heart to set up. You can as well only use one of the operating systems at a time.

Virtual operating system

Another solution is to use a virtual operating system. This is the idea: Let’s say that you’re using a Mac. Using virtualization software, you can run Windows as if it were an application on your computer. Essentially, your computer is acting as if it were running an in every way separate computer together.

You can buy virtualization software, nevertheless a good free and open-source option is VirtualBox from Oracle. This isn’t a full review of VirtualBox, yet I can describe some of its features. You can install it on Windows, Mac, or Linux. VirtualBox at that time runs on the host operating system like any other program. When you run VirtualBox, you can set up different virtual computers, at once install an operating system on them. For instance, on my Mac I might want to run a Windows virtual machine and an Ubuntu virtual machine. You can at that time start up the virtual computers, which will open in another window. From there, you run whatever software you like on the new OS.