Virtual Box for Linux and Windows Integration

I normally use Linux on my PC, but sometimes I need to use also Windows applications.

The traditional solution would be to have a booting manager like Grub and reboot Windows to access Windows applications. This solution is inconvenient and I decided therefore to look for a product that would allow me to access both environments without re-booting.

I used in the past win4lin, but its support has been recently discontinued and I decided therefore to install Virtual Box, , a virtualization platform originally developed by Sun Micro Systems and later supported by Oracle, after its aquisition of Sun.

I installed VirtualBox on my OpenSuSE 11.3 Linux distribution and then I installed Windows XP as a guest operating system of Virtual Box.

I found the installation pretty straightforward and I am now pretty happy with the results.

The integration is complete because Windows can access also Linux directories if you declare them as shared folders in the Virtual box.

However I had initially some integration problems between the two platform because Windows did not see the shared folder that I had declared.

I have written a full report on my experience which describes also how the integration problem above has been solved.

You can view the report at the Datamission.co.uk website.