I had already been planning to install Debian 7 and CentOS 6 VMs on my Winbox again, when I got a strange email. Some print publisher wanted to grab my two Linux books and publish them. I told them they would have to palaver with Smashwords because I wasn’t going to withdraw the books. As an after thought, I told them I might consider writing a different edition of each book for them, if they could give me a few days.
So now I had all the more reason to restore those VMs, but I felt it was important to share some results here.
If your Host OS is Windows, use VMWare. Oracle does make a version of Virtual Box to run on Windows, but you will not like it. The defaults for installing a Linux Guest OS aren’t just kinda bad, they are egregiously hatefully evil. You get no clues and you will have a very bad experience unless you know a whole lot about it already. On top of that, the Windows version if missing some critical features. I honestly believe the Oracle folks intend to make you cry.
VMWare is still a bit of work if you are installing Linux guests, but if you read someone’s review of it, you might learn a few tips. Also, you can read the exhaustive documentation here; it’s all PDFs.
If your Host OS is Linux, use Virtual Box. It’s much easier and works every time. It has features apparently not offered on their Windows version. However, you will have to figure out how to get the DKMS module for your Linux kernel, often by adding some repository that provides it, if it’s not included in the base. Details on installing to Linux are here, just scroll down a bit. At any rate, that’s my recommendations.
