As I had blogged a couple of months back, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my server and have been quite happy since. The system is very stable, I get all the applications I need for free and don't have to worry about updating them (Ubuntu shows me updates periodically for all applications installed through its package manager - like Windows Updates) and have no dearth of functionality.
However, I still had my Windows installation on another partition - just in case - because, much as Ubuntu is cool, there are still a few applications that need Windows, and my wife hasn't warmed up completely to Ubuntu due to occasional hardware glitches (mouse stuttering for example).
Today I was generally browsing through the applications available via the "Add/Remove..." option in Ubuntu and came across a little piece of heaven called VirtualBox from Sun.
In the Windows world, the one application that I used fairly often was Microsoft Virtual PC. I believe it's one of the better products from M$ and more importantly, it was free. With Virtual PC, you can install any other OS to run 'virtually' on Windows, such as Ubuntu (although it had its issues).
VirtualBox is essentially Virtual PC for Ubuntu, only an even better version. It installed in less then a minute. Then I created a simple Virtual Machine and a Virtual Hard Disk using a fairly familiar user interface, pointed it to my Windows ISO image, and lo and behold, I had a Windows XP running on my Ubuntu in less than 20 minutes. Ironically, I felt XP installed faster on VirtualBox than even on Virtual PC - and the start-up time is roughly 10 seconds!
With this, I think my transformation to Ubuntu is finally complete, with the last piece of the puzzle tightly in place. Now, I can have Ubuntu and Windows harmoniously running. Even better, with Ubuntu's multiple desktop feature, I can simply full-screen Windows XP on another desktop. With that, all I have to do is to flick my mouse to go back and forth between the two OS.
Now, that's what I call comfort!
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