seamless
Windows Host – Linux Guest – Seamless Mode
Sep 15th
In pre 2.0 VirtualBox seamless mode was only for Windows guests on linux hosts. Now Linux guests on Windows hosts benifit from this invaluable feature. Albeit there are not many instances where a graphical linux program is require without a Windows alternative, but if need be the feature is available. Just boot up your guest, and hit your hotkey + l and viola, VirtualBox rips the gnome, or kde docks right off the desktop and slaps it into Windows. Frankly it can’t get much better than this, and my main hopes for the future is better linux kernel support further reducing host CPU load when the guests are idle. This will further realize the dream of virtualization, which is the deployment of multiple virtual machines on a single host system. The less host CPU load experienced results in more guest OSs being deployable.
Open Solaris in VirtualBox – Comparision and Usefulness
Sep 14th
Open Solaris is only available in a 32bit flavor, and is well supported by Sun’s VirtualBox. When your host OS is 64bit you cannot use flash in your web browser without using nspluginwrapper, or installing a 32bit compatibility layer. Rather than having a tremendous amount of unnecessary code on your system, simply to run flash in a web browser, I prefer using a 32bit OS in a VirtualBox guest environment. Open Solaris supports seamless mode and from a graphical perspective is indistinguishable from a standard Debian based Gnome desktop. On the backend Open Solaris is very different. Utilizing a UNIX kernel, and a custom Sun package management system there are a variety of nuances that make Open Solaris different. Aptitude, and the shorthand apt-get command is only available in Debian land, and yum is only available in Red Hat land. Open Solaris utilizes pkgadd. The following is a tabled list comparing the two package management systems: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/apt_ips/ After getting the hang of Open Solaris a bit, it becomes functional just like Linux. Its stable like Linux, with the main advantage that it is supported by Sun Corporation. It is probably extremely debatable whether to use a UNIX based OS or Linux. From a LAMP server environment I see little difference in functionality.
VirtualBox – Seamless Mode With Windows and Linux Sharing Same Desktop
Dec 25th
VirtualBox seamless mode places the Windows taskbar above your Gnome or KDE taskbar. The Windows desktop is not displayed. When you open a Firefox or Internet Explorer web browser, from the Windows taskbar and save a file from a website, it will save to the Windows desktop. To compensate you can allow Windows to share the exact same desktop as your host Linux OS. You can save files from Windows web browsers directly to the shared Linux desktop. Essential this is taking seamless a step further!! First enable VirtualBox shared folder support for your desired guest OS. Make the shared folder either your Linux desktop directly, or simply your home directory. Then mount the shared folder in the guest OS:
net use x: vboxsvrDesktop
Then open regedit. Locate the key:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders]
Change the desktop key to:
1) x: ; if you set the shared folder to be your Linux desktop folder
2) x:Desktop ; if you set the shared folder to be your Linux home folder
Now just reboot your Windows guest OS and observe the seamless consolidation of your Windows and Linux desktops!! This is one of my favorite Linux tweaks 
I now run the virtual server in headless mode. If your interested in my new desktop configuration you can see it in this post!! Its frikkin cool. On my system notice that a virtual server environment is running in the top right window. That is the actual server environment that is hosting this website.
