A new tool for the toolbox!

Firstly – my VM setup:

I’m running Virtualbox with Xubuntu 9.10 on Win7 host – and its pretty. Its on a office standard issue Dell D531 – meaning they’re AMD Turion X2 TL-60 and 2GB of RAM.

Now the Turion’s supposed to have hw virtualization (AMD-V) however, the moment hw virtualization was enabled in virtualbox and I tried starting the vm, the machine would hard reboot!!!

After searching high and low, turns out that its an issue with Dell bioses and they dont have any updates. Here’s a page that tracks the issue. Imagine my happiness when a couple of days ago, found that dell had released an unofficial bios update (T12).Well, its gone in, and things are running swimmingly well – my VM now has 2 procs, is stable and I hardly feel I’m in a VM . In fact, this post is coming from the VM  – firefox with 12 tabs, a few terminals and emacs running on 600 MB of RAM.

Now let me come to the new tool I was talking about

I like to run the VM full screen – feels best that way. After trying out enough and more of multiple desktop softwares, have finally settled on VirtuaWin – beats the crap out of other tools, systray integration is great, has window rules and so on. Over the past couple of weeks, its come close to the ideal tool – does the job well and you hardly know its there