Sun finally released VirtualBox 1.6.0, the first major relase, since Sun acquired Innotek.
The most outstanding changes are:
+ support for Mac as host platform
+ support for Solaris as host platform
+ Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) is now officially supported
+ Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
- Sun obviously discontinued Debian and Ubuntu repositories (you won't find that in the release notes)
Since I was really keen to see the seamless mode in action, I installed a Debian Lenny (5.0) snapshot into VirtualBox.
I installed the VirtualBox Guest-Additions on both systems. It seems Debian Lenny has some problem loading the Virtualbox device drivers:
Fortunately, there's an easy workaround: Just switch to a terminal and start vboxadd by hand.
/etc/init.d/vboxadd start
/etc/init.d/gdm restart
After starting Debian Lenny with the Guest-Additions, I tried the seamless mode. Unfortunately, Lenny's panels exactly cover Ubuntu's panels:
When testing seamless mode with Windows, this did not happen. The Windows task bar always stays above the bottom panel. I tried to attenuate this behavior by replacing Lenny's panels with one very small panel with an enclosed menu and application switcher.
While this basically works quite well, there's a huge drawback: You can't move or delete your desktop icons any longer while running a seamless guest system. At least for me, this is a serious showstopper. Without being able to organize my desktop, I don't need any "seamless" integration at all. In fact, "seamless" is quite exaggerated. Besides clipboard compatibility, there's no integration at all. You just don't see the background image of your guest system.
Besides that, VirtualBox is a nice alternative to VMWare's free server, although I wished Sun would partner up with Canonical and get the "non-Open Source Edition" VirtualBox into Ubuntu's partner repository. Or even better: Just release the rest of the code as open source.
