VirtualBox itself, I like. The authors seem to have actually read Eric Raymond's old essay on the "Luxury of Ignorance", and made an effective user interface that does not *argue* with you, and works well with multiple types of server and client. I use it on a Windows box for best performance of games, and use VirtualBox for my Scientific Linux and similar environments. The use of the right "Alt" key rather than "Ctrl-Alt" combinations to switch away from the VM screen is one of my favorite bright moves from its designers.
The Oracle virtual VM's are a freeware problem. Oracle has tried to proprietize someone Red Hat's free software and open source work, especially the kernel, and it would be quite difficult to bring their changes over to SL or other freeware rebuild environments. Oracle's own download pages point to their "public" yum server at http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/. Unfortunately, the repository is not browseable, probably to reduce the likelihood of people making mirrors of it. To review its contents without installing them, you have to set up a yum configuration and run something like "reposync -n -u --repoid=ol6_latest", or mirror them locally with the "reposync" command. This is feasible, but it's a pain, and makes picking and choosing awkward. And that seems to be the point. The source packages seem to be avaialble at https://oss.oracle.com/ol6/SRPMS-updates/. So what do you get with this commoditized distribution and especially kernel? You get hot kernel updates (which can be *very* useful to avoid downtime when updating a live, mission critical host), and guaranteed compatibility with Oracle software (which is not a fmall thing for a big iron Oracle server handling thousands of transactions a second). Scientific Linux, and CentOS, have been *very* good about making their work genuinely open and accessible. They've also been very good about labeling their modified packages as modified, with an I'm not sure I want to cooperate with this sort of "we'll make the files available, but we won't tell you their names" sort of silliness. >> Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 12:04:22 -0700 >> From: ykar...@csusb.edu >> To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov >> Subject: VMs of EL and other environments > >> >> I realize that VirtualBox is separate from SL. However, Oracle has a >> distro based upon the same TUV that SL uses and provides a set of >> pre-built VMs for >> specific purposes - title and URL appear below. Has anyone on this list >> used any of these, and if so, any comments on the efficacy of such use? >> A reply off-list is fine if this is not a list topic. VirtualBox is >> available as an EL6 binary RPM for both IA-32 and X86-64, and seems to >> run well with no missing dependencies or crashes. >> >> Thanks, >> >> Yasha Karant >> >> Pre-Built Developer VMs (for Oracle VM VirtualBox) >> >> >> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/developer-vm/index.html