VirtualBox Seamless Mode

It's been about two years since I really used VirtualBox, and at that point it was mainly so I could develop packages on various OSs (Solaris, Windows, Linux, etc..). I can't recall if Seemless Mode was available, but it wasn't a feature I used at the time. I would normally boot my VM in full screen and go from there.

But my current job requires me to VPN into their environment for certain functions, but the VPN actually hampered my ability to perform other job functions. To allow me to be both on VPN and off-vpn, I loaded up virtualbox with my companies standard linux build. Now, I was prepared to simply switch back & forth between the VM and my desktop...until I found seamless mode.

This is not a new feature, if you use VMware, parallels, or VirtualBox you have most likely already come across it. A good write-up on it can be found here: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=757

Now I can switch between my linux and windows applications seamlessly (get it just like the name!).

Like I said, nothing ground breaking...but its still really really cool.

netbook chrome

Well...I installed one of the Flow builds (Chromium OS) by Hexxah: http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

If all you want is a browser, and let's face it with the number of web accessible application its a valid market, then chromium is decent. This isn't going to much of a review, because I really didn't get too deep into testing it. Additionally, I think it would be unfair to talk about bugs or missing features that I assume will be fixed by launch.

Anyway, I liked it for a beta and look forward to the official release when its finally available. It worked on my HP with no issues. It booted and ran well off of a thumb drive, and installed easily on the HD.

I'm now going to check out Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition...in general I like the Ubuntu distros so I expect to be generally pleased with their Netbook OS. Guess we'll see in a couple weeks.