The software includes specially adapted drivers for more or less all areas of the system that not only significantly improve handling but also promise a substantial performance boost, including dynamic resizing of the guest to the format of the surrounding window. In the dialog that follows, you can define which drivers and features you want to install ( Figure 2).

To start the installation, just click Setup.

This tells the software to mount an ISO image containing the guest extensions on the virtual machine's DVD drive. After booting the system, select VM | Install VMware Tools. To leverage the full potential of the system on the virtual machine, you still need to install the guest extensions. On a positive note, Windows 8.1 comes with rudimentary VMware support: The mouse and keyboard seamlessly move into the virtual machine, as soon as the mouse pointer touches the Windows pane.įigure 1: Version 10 of the VMware desktop only comes with a profile for Windows 8 but worked well with Windows 8.1 in our lab.

The subsequent installation of Windows completed without any problems in our lab. In this test, I used the profile for the 64-bit version of the 8.1 predecessor, Windows 8 ( Figure 1). As a major innovation, the company advertises support for Windows 8.1 however, the matching device profile is still missing. The price for a new license is EUR 225, whereas an upgrade costs EUR 110. In September 2013, VMware published the 10th release of its commercial VMware Workstation software. I took a look at how these leading virtualization alternatives work with the latest Windows. The biggest players in the market for Windows desktop virtualization on Linux are VirtualBox and VMware Workstation. (One exception is gaming, which tends to work better without virtualization.) VM technology is so mature that, in normal use, it is difficult to tell the difference between Windows on a virtual machine and on a physical system. The most popular alternative on today's networks is to run Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux host. Another alternative is to dual boot, but a dual-boot configuration requires you to restart your computer whenever you want to switch systems. However, Wine doesn't support all versions of all programs. One easy solution is to run Windows applications directly on Linux using the Wine API.

Some tools simply don't have a Linux equivalent, and other situations require Windows for compatibility with co-workers or clients. Life without Windows just doesn't work for many users.

How to use virtualbox on windows 8