Today’s World Wide Web Wednesday link is…
https://www.virtualbox.org/ – Oracle VM VirtualBox
You’ll have to forgive me on this one. This isn’t as much a cool site you can visit as it is a tool that you can use, but it’s the site that I came up with.
VirtualBox is a program that runs virtual machines. A virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a particular computer system (thank you, Wikipedia) or – to try and really dumb it down – a ‘computer’ that runs on another computer.
What do you use it for? Well, here’s an example. The family computer at home is an Apple. One of the applications that I need to access equipment at work runs exclusively on Windows. So, when you want to be able to access your stuff at work without having to go to the car and get the work laptop, what do you do? That’s right – you run your software on a Windows emulator on your Linux virtual machine residing on your Apple computer. Why? I don’t have a Microsoft license or a spare computer lying around. Complicated? Kind of. Works? You betcha.
I also use VirtualBox at work. I display data using a program called ‘Dashing’ that runs exclusively on Linux, yet it needs to pull data from a program that runs exclusively on Windows. By running a Linux virtual box on a Windows machine, I’m able to handle all this one one machine. Another neat thing about this application is that it runs on a closed network. To update the software, I clone the entire computer, move it to a computer that is exposed to the internet, do my updates, and write it back onto the closed network. This also can serve as a backup that you can start almost immediately.
What’s the best thing about VirtualBox? It’s open-source and absolutely free. When you the procurement process is as difficult as the one I have to deal with at work, you find ways to work around it. As with most free software, you are still going to ‘pay something’ when you use it – just ask anyone who has gotten malware on their computer downloading something. In the case of VirtualBox, what you pay is your time to figure it out which, thanks to copious amounts of documentation, isn’t much.
Ever wanted to give a Linux distribution a whirl? (For the record, I’m writing this blog from a Linux machine) Give VirtualBox a try.