Windows unter Linux, oder Adios, Dualboot

Virtualbox is a nice little program. It allows you to use from within your main operating system (for me this would be Ubuntu) other operating systems (like Windows, Mac OS, etc.).

My notebook Fujitus-Siemens Amilo si1520 came with a Windows Vista Home Premium licence. I hardly use it. Most programs I need run under Ubuntu (or I could a decent equivalent). So I hardly boot Windows, but it is still occupying 20 Gigabyte of my hard disk. I have hardly anything installed so I am wondering why it needs 20 Gigabyte, but this is an other story, I guess.

However, I had installed Virtualbox installed quite a while ago, but I did not really get how to install Windows (I tried to use my dualboot windows, which did not work).

No I thought I’d give it another try. So I took my Vista recovery DVD and installed it within  Virtualbox. The process was quite straight forward. I had to create a virtual hard disk first, then could install Vista and it runs. With the older version from the Ubuntu repositories I had some trouble with the network. I found the blog of Jan Beier, who had similar problems with using the network in Virtualbox. He gave me the tip to install the newest version from the Virtualbox website. And now it works smoothly. However, the network seems pretty slow to me. I will see if I will find a fix for that too.

I might soon be able to format the partition on my hard disk where Windows Vista is installed and free some 20GB of space. Nice!

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