Saturday, January 14, 2012

Virtual Box VM portability

I am researching possibilities for my new portable development setup that I will be installing on my new laptop. Experience has shown me that weight and battery life are more important than processor power for laptops I use in demos and presentations so I have ordered a Macbook Air 13" system.

I will be leaving OSX intact on the machine and probably dual-booting Windows 7 too but as an experiment I looked into the issues of using virtual machines copied between the two OS's by copying my Windows 8 Developer Preview VM from the PC to my recently upgraded Mac Mini to see if Virtual Box could indeed run a straight copy on both systems.

I can happily report that it does, however there is a small problem of keyboard interaction inasmuch as the VirtualBox VM running on the Mac doesen't seem to be getting the same scan codes from the keyboard via the Mac as it does via the PC. The VM on the Mac will not respond to the Start key for example and so it can be problematic switching applications in Metro on the Mac based VM.

I'll continue to do more on this as time goes on but if you have any experience in theese matters please feel free to comment here or to send me a friend request on the facebook link seen on this page where we can discuss your experiences in more detail.

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