With the onset of climate change, the credit crunch and the fear of concrete dwarfs I decided that in order to stay sane I should try out the latest version of Ubuntu as my operating system…hahahaha

Well, the actual reason was because we are closing down our office and selling the Fedora box that I have been developing on for almost 3 years now, so I needed a local development environment other than Windows.

I have found Ubuntu pretty sweet and I think that the latest release of Intrepid Ibex (8.10) has some great new updates and features, most notably improved support for dual monitors and wireless.

Anyway, this post isn’t really about Ubuntu, but more about VirtualBox, which is also free and open-source version of parallels. Woohooo – Nice one!! The process of setting it up was really simple and the only problem that I have got at the moment is trying to get sound working on my guest (Windows XP) machine.

The most important piece of advice that I could give to anyone wanting to do the same thing is that they should install the guest additions on the guest machine. In order to do so you need to mount the .iso image on a cd-rom in the Virtualbox control panel before starting it up. Then once the new virtual machine has started install the guest additions. This will allow better keyboard functionality, full screen and the use of USB and other hardware. There is a good tutorial for how to do this on seogadget.co.uk

As I mentioned previously I am just struggling with getting the sound working, so if anyone has any ideas here then please let me know