[Wylug-discuss] Running Windows with VirtualBox

[Aaron Crane]

Smylers <Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:
> My most common reason for wanting Windows is to see how a webpage looks
> in IE, while fiddling with it. Having to reboot to do that doesn't sound
> significantly less painful than using NetRenderer

If that's the only thing you anticipate needing Windows for (and it's
certainly the only thing I've needed Windows for in a long time) then
there may be another option.  Microsoft offer free downloads of a
Virtual PC image with Windows 7 and IE9; and it *may* be possible to
convert that image to a format that can be run with VMware and/or
VirtualBox.  (Googling suggested so when I was looking into this, but
eventually I bottled and just ran Virtual PC under a Windows XP system
that I happened to have access to, so I can't report actual success,
I'm afraid.)

Even if this does work, there are various restrictions on what you can
do with the image.  In particular, I think there was something along
the lines of if you want to save data to the virtual hard disk, the
image will expire after a period (3 months, I think).  I dealt with
this by merely not saving any data; I get Windows Genuine Advantage
complaints every time I launch it, but IE9 works fine, and I've only
needed to fight with Microsoft's painful download site once.

This idea also doesn't help with running older versions of IE, but it
seems to be much easier to get hold of a usable Windows XP image than
Windows Vista or Windows 7 (needed for IE9).

-- 
Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/