Ubuntu 9.10, Sun Virtual Box

I am liking my HP dv7 laptop very much.

I had one small regret in that the 2GHz Core2 Duo Intel processor that it has does not support hardware virtualization, that means no Hypervisor Virtual Machines, that means no Microsoft Virtual PC or XP mode under Windows 7.

Yesterday Google announced the Go language, and I wanted to give it a "go".

First I installed Ubuntu 9.10 desktop on a USB key, downloaded all the google stuff and got to writing Hello World in one tenth of the time that it takes to do that with Windows 7 and Visual Studio. Very cool to have a USB flash drive that has a personal bootable system on it, but I really need multiple OSes for testing.

I'd heard about Sun Virtual Box, but after the less than fantastic experiences with VMWare Fusion One (VPC for OSX), Hypervisor and Virtual PC, I wasn't sure that it would be worth it to take the time to look at another virtualization platform.

Sun Virtual Box works great. The time from downloading Virtual Box... Installing Ubuntu 9.10... Installing updates... Installing Google Go... to running the Hello World a.out was about 40 minutes total.

Using Virtual Box to "hibernate" saving Ubuntu's running state takes about five seconds, as does restoring Ubuntu. That seems much faster than opening a document in Word!