Switching to Ubuntu Part III: Working with VirtualBox
After publishing my last blog post about switching to Ubuntu, I took a short break for a while. I had a few problems:
- I couldn’t get the VPN running as my company was using a proprietary protocol.
- I couldn’t find a good Exchange client replacement under Linux.
- My company had bought me an iPhone and iTunes was not available on Linux.
I came up with a solution to bypass these problems. I installed Oracle’s (Sun’s) VirtualBox OSE from the sources on my Ubuntu installation, and then added Windows 7 to it. Everything worked well, except for the USB connection. Googling the problem, I found VirtualBox OSE doesnt support USB on the virtual machine.
I decided to try the proprietary version of VirtualBox. VirtualBox OSE didn’t de-install at first attempt, so I had to remove it via the command line:
$ sudo apt-get remove virtualbox-ose
After that, I downloaded and installed the proprietary version of VirtualBox. Hooray! It supported USB and recognized my iPhone as a USB device. All systems were now go!
The process of switching over to Ubuntu continues…stay tuned for more of my experiences.