Virtual CloneDrive

This is the best Optical Drive emulation in existence right now (in my opinion). I used to use Alcohol, but they started wanting money. I used Daemon Tools, but they added spy/mal/adware. So now I turn back to ElaborateBytes and SlySoft. These developers really know how to please.

Virtual CloneDrive has a lot going for it. From great emulation to a humble price tag (i.e. free), you can expect the unexpected. The main selling point for this is that it is from a company I trust, and it is free (cause I'm poor). This thing is easy to install, and easy to use. It isn't very complex or bloated with features you probably wont use. It has a little tray icon that starts up when windows does and hides out in your task bar. You can turn this off, but I've stopped caring about programs that hide down there since Windows 7.

A potential downside, it does install its own drivers on your computer. While this isn't a big deal, it does bother some people.

I'm just waiting for Microsoft to figure out that people really do want to emulate CD Drives so they don't have to burn a disk image every time! It was kind of them to include the ability to burn ISO files natively in Windows 7. But seriously. Why waste a disk unless you are giving it to a friend or loading a new OS?

Virtual CloneDrive can be found here: http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

VirtualBox Shared Folders - Linux Guest

I keep forgetting how to add a shared folders in my Kubuntu guest machine, so I'm posting it here to help remind me.

Select the folder to share on the host.

VirtualBox -> Settings -> Shared Folders -> Add New...

Create a place for the folder on the guest.

cd /home/username/Desktop/

mkdir ShareName

note: username is your user name, ShareName is some meaningful folder name

It is very important to select a folder that has nothing in it. If you do select an existing folder all the contents will be copied into the host folder. This is a big problem if you point the folder to /home/user.

And one final step. If you want to add the folder perminantly and mount it each time on startup, add the following line to the end of the /etc/fstab file.

ShareName /home/username/Desktop/ShareName vboxsf default 0 0

And that is it. Now anything you put in that particular folder you will see in both the guest and the host OS.