[Solved] Can OpenOffice be used in VirtualBox?

[akyahoo]

Can OpenOffice 3.0 be used in VritualBox?

I wonder whether it is stable enough inside VritualBox.

[ccornell]

What are you asking? Have you actually installed and used VirtualBox?

VirtualBox is a Virtual Machine application. If you install VirtualBox, you cannot just install some random application into VirtualBox... you first have to install an operating system into VirtualBox. VirtualBox provides you a virtual computer that runs on top of your host computer and operating system. Any OS you install into VirtualBox runs the same (almost) as if it was installed natively. Any applications you install onto that OS in VirtualBox work as normal.

So, to answer your question, yes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 can be used in VirtualBox as long as it is available for the OS you've installed FIRST into VirtualBox. As far as OpenOffice.org is concerned, it has no idea it's been installed into a VirtualBox machine instead of on the host machine.

[TheGurkha]

+1.

I use VirtualBox to host my Linux OS's and other instances of Windows so I can have different versions and flavours of OOo available for testing and so forth, on my single PC. The only thing you should notice is a slight decrease in speed of the virtual computer compared to one that is running directly on real hardware. RAM is the thing here, the more the better, needless to say.

[ccornell]

Same here. I have a Linux host, and then multiple Linux guests (various distributions), and at least one OpenSolaris guest as well. I often run more than one guest OS at the same time even (I have lots of RAM in my computer) - usually for work related stuff. It is a great way to test code on different OSes, test different OSes and so on.

The only "wish" I have right now is that OSX would be supported as a guest OS.

[akyahoo]

Yes, I use CentOS Linux 5.2 inside VirtualBox. But I worry about the stability after installing OpenOffice inside CentOS. Now I can only test the OpenOffice in a real machine, which uses Windows XP. Can OpenOffice run on Linux system stably? I have to consider the stability of VirtualBox at the same time even it can run on Linux.

[ccornell]

Linux overall is MUCH more stable than anything produced by Microsoft. It is more secure, crashes less, works faster/better, not susceptible to 99.99% of the viruses and exploits that hit Windows users every day etc etc. There is good reason the vast majority of the internet runs on Linux and Apache2

OpenOffice.org in Linux is built off the same source code as the Windows version. In my experience, OOo on Linux actually is a smoother experience because I don't have to deal with all the broken aspects of MS Windows.

Running OpenOffice.org in VirtualBox on a Linux OS is no different than running it on a natively installed Linux. Speed and performance of the VitrualBox OS is dependent on the host hardware (CPU and especially RAM). If you are running it on a system with only 1GB of RAM, you will have speed issues. If you have 4GB of RAM and are able to assign 1.5GB or so to the guest OS, then you won't even notice it's a VM - especially if you run it full screen.