Thank you Xerox, IBM, SUN !

From college (undergrad school for Americans) days, I am a strong supporter of open source software and in general open technologies and standards . Yes, you guessed it right, typical engineering college boy(not gals) mentality. I started using Linux to show others that I am a nerd :)  and cool but believe me it was for the start and now I am a true Linux fan. Unfortunately I have to use windows even though I hate it because My company provided laptop Dell Vostro 1510 doesn't support Linux and I cant find NIC or Ethernet and audio driver for it. I tried my best and searched extensively and unsuccessfully to find the drivers. I was completely frustrated and was thinking seriously of buying a laptop or a Desktop so that I can install Linux on it. Some of my friends suggested me to use some virtualization tools to use Linux over windows but my experience in college with these tools were too bad so I hesitated doing so. Then one of my friend told me to use SUN virtual box and convinced me to give it a shot. Bingo! its amazing! Its too cool to resist. You can have as many guest Operating systems over the host windows as you want and it works really nice. No issues with speed. Now I run two Operating systems, Fedora and Opensolaris over an unwanted Windows XP. I still have problem with audio driver inside virtual box but it hardly matters as I can run the three operating systems simultaneously. I can use windows for audio, video and Linux for doing real stuff at the same time on a single machine. 

All the three companies I admire most have proved to be useful for me. #1 on the list Xerox helped me a lot in college. Without photocopier from Xerox my life in college could never be that free and joyful as it was. #2 on the list IBM is my first employer and provided me every opportunity to be successful. You guessed it right, #3 on the list, SUN gave me virtual box which saved me of wasting my hard earned money (not really :P) to some computer vendor.

If you are facing the same problem of using windows or you wanna give Linux a try without experiencing the pain of using dual boot system, just go through the following steps.

1)Download and install virtual box from here.

2)If you want to use opensolaris then download it from here. If you already have some Linux distro cd or ISO image then cool! If you want latest Fedora, get it from here.

3)Start virtual box and add guest OS. Its pretty simple and with a little bit of common sense you can do it easily.

4)Have a nice time using as many operating system as you want simultaneously inside a virtual machine and a single real Machine.