Toolbox crossovers vs parallels

[Aidan Wilson]

Hi Margaret,

I run Toolbox using a virtual machine through VirtualBox, a VM cient written by 
Sun Microsystems some time ago and since bought by Oracle. It's still free, but 
you need to have an operating system to install on it. Windows XP is usually 
quite easy to find.

I've never used Crossover, but I've seen others use it an seen how clunky it 
can be to load software in it. Emulators in general I think can be a bit 
awkward, but then again so can running an entire virtal machine for one 
program.

One good thing about virtualbox is that it has seamless integration with the 
host operating system, so I can now copy-paste between windows and mac, and I 
can 'hide' the windows background and auto-hide the start bar, so it's 
essentially invisible, but the toolbox windows sit in the same space as 
everything else. You can also mount local (host machine) directories, such as 
your entire home directory, on the guest machine so they render as networked 
folders (on a virtual network between the host and the guest).

When I first used virtualbox, I created a disk image that had just about 
everything stripped out of it (IE, outlook, windows 'live' things, office 
things, etc.) so that it was a really small operating system. Despite this it's 
still a huge space hog. And you also have to allocate a certain amount of ram 
to it for when it's running, but as I only have a couple of things on it 
(toolbox and any other program I need that isn't available on Mac) it generally 
only needs 512MB ram. If your computer has 2GB at least then this is a 
negligible loss.

The benefits of using a virtual machine increase when you need to add more 
programs, in my opinion.

Can't speak to parallels, but I've used VM ware fusion and I think the free and 
open-source Virtal Box is superior to it in every conceivable way.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

PhD Candidate in Linguistics
School of Languages and Linguistics
The University of Melbourne

+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
@aidanbwilson

On Fri, 2 Dec 2011, Margaret Carew wrote:

> Hi – just wondering who prefers using toolbox with crossovers – or is parallels better?
> 
> thanks
> --
> Margaret Carew
> Arandic Endangered Languages Project
> Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education
> Alice Springs NT 0870
> 08 8951 8344 / 0422 418 559
> margaret.carew at batchelor.edu.au
> 
>