I just realize that dual booting Ubuntu on my MacBook Air is huge barrier for me to use it. I’m always too lazy to wait the painful shutdown/reboot process. Then, I need to consider the alternative option, yes, Virtualization.

I have seen some of my colleagues using Windows on their cute Apple laptops via Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Definitely, all that copies are pirate and I don’t want to follow their path. After finding information around, I found that there is also a good free (as free speech) one, VirtualBox.

Although VirtualBox web site states that Mac version is still beta and lacks some features as in Windows/Linux version, my test concludes that it’s enough for normal usage.

The setup process is straightforward if you’ve ever used some VM technologies (for me, it’s VMWare Server a while ago). Just download VirtualBox disk image, install it as normal Mac application, create a VM image and setup new OS as if it’s native one. This article from Mac2Windows gives very detailed, step-by-step, howto for beginner.

I have little problem with video resolution. It’s limited to 800x600 and installing guest additional driver doesn’t show more options in preference. Fortunately, Ubuntuforums tends to have every answers for your every question. Just adding one line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf can fix it.

Running another OS in virtualized mode is inferior in term of performance and cause some input confusions. Anyway, it’s lower the barrier of booting process. I hope I can review Ubuntu 8.04 final by this method.