One the very few things that I need Windows for now is JavaME development. The Netbeans mobility pack runs under Linux but unfortunately all the manufacturers’ emulators require Windows. So now that I have sold my Windows laptop I needed some other way of running Windows. I considered using bootcamp on my MacBook or even repartitioning my linux box to dual boot Windows but I am now using some VM software called VirtualBox.

I actually have a copy of VMWare 4.5 but that doesn’t play nice with the latest Fedora versions so rather than pay to upgrade VMWare I am using VirtualBox which is free for personal use. So far it runs really nicely on my dual-core Linux machine.

A few things I needed to get it going under FC6:

• Install the version for all distributions
• Install compat-libstdc++-33
• Make sure you put any users into the vboxusers group
• Mess around with SELinux settings as described here