Ever since I switched from MS DOS to Unix and then Linux, I have never felt the desire to move back to the Windows world. Yet in the real world, MS Windows is an operating system (OS) that you simply can't avoid. For example, I compiled 3DNA v2.0 in Cygwin and MinGW, both in Windows. For such an one time process, my dual boot-able Ubuntu and Vista has worked just fine. However, when writing an article in a collaborative setting, access to Word has becomes a
must and switching back and forth between Linux and Windows is really a pain -- not just time consuming, but also the inconvenience in communicating files between the two OSes. OpenOffice is fine for personal, occasional use, but I have experienced some (subtle) compatibility issues with Word, especially with EndNote support for citations and bibliography.
In the past couple of days, I installed
Sun VirtualBox 2.2.2 onto my Ubuntu 9.04 with the following settings:
- Windows XP (MS Office 2003, EndNote X2)
- 512 MB base memory
- 12 MB video memory
- 10 GB hard disk
- With Guest Additions installed
I have played around for a little while, and everything seems to work just fine. Now I have full access to MS Office (Word, PowerPoint etc) and EndNote. I really like the feature of "
Shared Folders": it allows me to directly access files in my host Linux box from within the guest Windows XP.
The VirtualBox UserManual.pdf is pretty well-written: after reading carefully the first four chapters, I did not have much trouble in getting the system up and running. I also referenced the following two blog posts:
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