As you may have read in a pre­vi­ous post I was unsuc­cess­ful in get­ting Adobe Cre­ative Suite 3 to install via WINE or CROSSOVER (CS4 wouldn’t install either). So, at the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend I installed VMware Work­sta­tion 6.5… I was pretty impressed. It installed Win­dows XP PRO SP3 with­out a sin­gle hic­cup, it val­i­dated with Microsoft, updated just fine… I installed Adobe Cre­ative Suite 4 with­out any trou­ble and it also val­i­dated just fine…

How­ever, being new to Adobe Cre­ative Suite 4 I was really happy how it func­tioned. I also couldn’t tell if my issues were Adobe CS4 issues or vir­tu­al­iza­tion issues. The more I used Dreamweaver, Illus­tra­tor, and Pho­to­shop the more and more dis­pleased I was becom­ing… ESPECIALLY ILLUSTRATOR!

Any­way, I was read­ing an arti­cle regard­ing vir­tu­al­iza­tion and they men­tioned Vir­tu­al­Box - A prod­uct I knew lit­tle about. I read more about it and won­dered how would it stack up against VMware Work­sta­tion 6.5. I googled and searched for an answer, every pro­fes­sional review of the Vir­tu­al­Box was dated, not eval­u­at­ing Vir­tu­al­Box 3. So, I decided to install it and give it a whirl of my own.

At first, I installed via the Add/Remove Appli­ca­tion inter­face. This installed the OPEN SOURCE VERSION of Vir­tu­al­Box which did NOT have some of the util­i­ties described in the user guide I was fol­low­ing. I removed the appli­ca­tion and vis­ited the Vir­tu­al­Box web­site to down­load their Ubuntu Linux release. It down­loaded and I installed it.

It installed eas­ily and quickly. Some­thing I’ve become accus­tomed to with Ubuntu Linux. I then added a NEW VIRTUAL MACHINE, installed Win­dows and INSTALLED GUEST ADDITIONS which installs spe­cial dri­vers and seems to opti­mize the guest OS. After it installed, I updated via the Microsoft Update and so far, all is good.

I then installed Adobe Cre­ative Suite 3 — updated it, and all is good.

Now, I can’t com­pare CS4 to CS3 per­for­mace — although for the record CS3 in Vir­tu­al­Box is faster and more sta­ble than CS4 in VMware 6.5. Win­dows XP PRO SP3 is faster and feels more sta­ble in Vir­tu­al­Box than VMware 6.5 — although the per­for­mance dif­fer­ence is neg­li­gi­ble and sta­bil­ity is sub­jec­tive since Win­dows was never unre­spon­sive in either install.

The one fea­ture I do find miss­ing in Vir­tu­al­Box 3 is the fact I am UNABLE to drag and drop files into my GUEST OS. Although even in VMware this wasn’t with­out bugs. Often in VMware I would drag a file over, it would show a copy progress bar, be done, and no file would be in my Guest OS.

I got around this lim­i­ta­tion by just SHARING FOLDERS with the Guest OS so I could just natively find and use files from the HOST sys­tem (Ubuntu Linux).

I’ll share more details as I use this appli­ca­tion more…