Sun just made another open source acquisition: Innotek, the makers of the open source VirtualBox virtual machine application. Unlike MySQL, though, this is one open source acquisition that hits home for me in a major way.

Innotek rolled out a significant update to its VirtualBox open source virtualization software this week. According to Achim Hasenmueller, managing director of innotek, the release of VirtualBox 1.5.0 for Windows and Linux marks the first time seamless windowing -- the ability to display a single Windows application on a Linux desktop -- is available for Linux systems.

News just in is that Sun is buying innotek, the open source virtualization player whose VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop PCs running the Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris operating systems to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side...

VirtualBox is a free, powerful and versatile virtualization program which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows hosts, and can virtualize many different Operating Systems. VirtualBox was originally developed by Innotek, but was purchased by Sun and renamed Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Innotek VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. Some of the features of VirtualBox are: Modularity, virtual machine descriptions in XML, guest additions for Windows and Linux and shared folders. The following workshop describes how to install VirtualBox (OSE) on OpenSuse 10.3 and to install a WindowsXP guest addition.

Innotek's GPL-licensed Virtualbox software lets you create a virtual operating environment inside your PC's real operating system. I've been using Virtualbox for several months now on a 32-bit laptop running Ubuntu 7.04, and I've been impressed with the software.

Ever since I started using Ubuntu two years back, I have been an avid user of VMware server. It fascinated me to a great extent that I could actually run an OS inside an OS. Recently, I tried out VirtualBox, another virtualization software like VMware server, and I was greatly impressed by it.

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

I know that virtualization has been around for a while, but until finding VirtualBox, I've never had much success running virtualization software. VirtualBox is different. It's intuitive and easy to use. Here are the top 5 reasons why I love VirtualBox.