AprilandJake.com

As awesome as Linux is, I still have moments where I want something from the Windows world. Shy of putting a whole dual-booted partition on my harddrive, I am doing the virtual machine gig. I have tried VMWare before, but have just found the whole experience rather clunky. I even found VirtualPC (running on Windows) more pleasing. Another big kicker with VM's is performace -- I can't ever seem to get even comparable performance from a VM. Several of my coworkers report, however, that they are please with the performance of Sun's VirtualBox. I, therefore, am giving it a try.

All over the net, there are questions asked about running Crystal Reports in Linux. This isn't a solution for running Crystal in Linux per se, but running Crystal as lightweight as possible on a Linux host machine. This means, run a VM, install Crystal, and use a small Oracle client.

One of the stinky things about having a VM is that is can be difficult to transfer files to and from the host machine. You generally have everything that you need on the host machine and don't want to re-download stuff, burn CD's, or go through any of that jazz. Sharing folders is probably the best option.