Last night I wanted to give the new Inkscape 0.46 development version a go. However, I didn’t want to break my stable 0.45-1 version. Since I didn’t know what to expect from the development version, I thought this was a task for a virtual machine. Before I could get to it though, I needed to fix VirtualBox on my openSUSE machine.

I have been a VMWare user for a few years now. It has always worked very well for me in Windows XP, openSUSE and Ubuntu. One day I stumble across a tutorial for getting VirtualBox installed on an Ubuntu machine. I was curious so I followed the instructions and got it working. I think it took just a few minutes to get it going. Immediately I noticed that VirtualBox had a simpler interface and it “felt” lighter. I researched a little and found several opinions on the ‘net regarding how some found VirtualBox to be faster than VMWare. It does feels faster but sometimes other opinions influence my own judgment and I start to regurgitate what I read.

Awhile back I must have broken something or maybe not installed VirtualBox correctly on my openSUSE machine. It kept crashing on me. This behavior was not present at all on my Ubuntu machine. So I set out to remove, clean up , and re-install VirtualBox again. This time around I got the latest version straight from the VirtualBox website and got it right. VirtualBox runs and work great now.

I decided to give VMWare a rest for awhile. I haven’t uninstalled it yet but I stopped the services from running at boot and deleted my Windows XP and Damn Small Linux images. I ‘m strictly going to use VirtualBox for awhile. I reinstalled Windows XP and Damn Small Linux as virtual machines and away I went. VirtualBox is indeed a pleasure to use. So far the speed over VMWare is an improvement. Both XP and DSL ran very fast. Plus, the interface is faster. Maybe it has a smaller footprint than VMWare. I recommend VirtualBox to anybody willing to give virtualization a try.

I did end up giving Inkscape 0.46 a try in the end. It’s a little unstable at this point. I had a few crashes. I will say this though. I cannot wait until 0.46 is officially released. Many improvements. I checked out the new things that Ryan Lerch blogged about and they worked great. The new gradient improvements are going to be a major time saver. If there is any program that I would like the folks at Inkscape to take on then it would be Xara. Inkscape seems to be getting closer with each new release. To the Inkscape devs…keep up the great work.