Being a user of Microsoft Windows operating system it was easy for me to work on it. Being a computer student I did all my programs and all the work on the Windows itself but it was in my second year of graduation where I had subjects which were oriented with Unix and Unix-like operating systems. I had lot of data on my system so I couldn't give a lot of space to install the whole operating system. I started wondering whether there was any software that i could use to do that. Viola!! I just happened to hear from a friend of mine that you could install more than one os at the same time using this particular piece of software called Virtualbox.
Virtual box is a piece of software that allows you to install operating system on other operating system. The software is just easy to install and has features that are simple to understand. The software just allocates a limited space on the hard drive allowing you to install the os on that particular space instead formating the whole system. Installation of the os on the Virtual box is easy as installing that on the whole system.
It also allows the access of the network through small drivers that come along with the software. It is a great and handy tool for tester and allows the testing of their software in a virtual box without destroying their own system. And the best part is it is an open sourced software and could be downloaded free of cost at the link provided below:
There is a great advantage of using this software as even if the software that has been installed like the os crashes in the virtual box there are ready made virtual boxes available on the internet that could be just downloaded and deployed using the virtual box.
The virtual box software is available for all the operating systems including Mac and Linux distros. The screenshots give a view of Windows OS running on a Linux distro and Ubuntu running on FreeBSD .
Update On Dec 04, 2010: I have just mentioned installation of just one OS inside the box but that is not the case more than one operating system could be installed inside the box. Not just installation but they could be used all at a time too. There may be times when the space you allocated for the box might not be enough for your testing of the software, at such times the software comes in with some handy features like sharing and extension. You could either extend the amount of the space that you allocated for the box or you could just do that by simply using the shared folder option. The shared folder option is the simplest one as we could use the data that is present in the shared folder by all the OSes in the virtual box along with using them in the main OS in which the virtual box is installed.