Designed for a Windows-only world
Microsoft’s VirtualPC was once available for Macs and Windows, but now is only available and supported for Windows-based hosts. There are no guest tools available for other operating systems, and all other operating systems are installed as “other”. There’s no 64-bit guest virtual machine (VM) support, although there is a 64-bit version of Virtual PC.
Microsoft’s Virtual PC was once available for Macs and Windows, but now is only available and supported for Windows-based hosts. There are no guest tools available for other operating systems, and all other operating systems are installed as “other”. There’s no 64-bit guest virtual machine (VM) support, although there is a 64-bit version of Virtual PC.
If you want USB support, forget it because it’s not available. There is no snapshot support. You can get a full-screen view of guest operating VMs, but there are no integrated views. It’s possible to use an external monitor for the guest, if you simply must.
Guest installations have no “greased” or enlightened settings, even for Windows guests. We found the installation to be the equivalent of a native installation for the Ubuntu guests we tried, but the recommended amount of memory can be weak (example: recommended is 128MB for Windows XP).
Running Ubuntu guests
Installing Ubuntu required changing some of the boot options, as we needed to use safe-mode graphics and also specify the ‘noapic’ option; otherwise, no installation was possible (rather, booting the installation CD was impossible).
There were no Linux operating system choices available when installing; by contrast, there were quite a few Windows versions listed and then there was “other”. Sound card support was unavailable, performance was slow and networking worked. Interaction by mounting file systems was absent unless we used Windows and SAMBA peer networking as though they were two entirely separate machines.
Running Windows XP guests
As mentioned, Windows guests are welcome here. We found drag and drop file/folder movement worked well between XP guests on hosts of Vista/XP. Shared folders aren’t required.
Windows guest tools worked well to boost performance and enabled shared folders to work with no problems. The share folder was mounted as a drive in Windows. Still, guests had no access to native sound cards, any kind of USB devices and most other native host hardware.
Applications interaction is still separate-but-equal, with 32-bit application execution possible if the operating environment (host or guest) allows it. You can run Vista-only applications in a Vista guest, but you can’t launch them from XP and expect them to work — they only launch when executed from the guest. It’s primitive, and we expected more.
