On Sept. 2, 2008, Sun released VirtualBox 1.6.6. Then, two days later, version 2.0 was released. Finally, just over one week later, they put out version 2.0.2.

I’m not quite sure what was the reasoning behind releasing three new versions in less than two weeks, but I’m glad I wasn’t paying much attention. I would have been kind of upset if I had upgraded my version three times in that short amount of time.

Regardless, if you’re using an older version of VirtualBox, go ahead and upgrade.

VirtualBox 2.0x added the ability to run 64-bit guests (assuming you’re running a 64-bit OS as your host), along with a lot of other new features. As far as I can tell, VBox 2.0.2 basically featured about 10-15 bug fixes from v2.0.

I am probably quite late to the party, but I discovered Sun’s VirtualBox a few weeks ago, and have been extremely impressed. In the short time I’ve had VirtualBox installed, I have already installed two operating systems that I was never able to successfully install on Microsoft’s VirtualMachine.

With my Vista Home install as the host system, I am now running Windows 98SE and SuSE (11.0) as guests on my computer. I will most likely install Windows XP Professional fairly soon, as well; though I will have to see what I can do with the licensing, since I also want to run some fairly modern version of Windows as a guest on my SuSE machine.

With Microsoft VM, I was never able to get Win98 installed properly (it always froze when I was trying to install), nor was I able to get any distros of Linux running through VM.

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A few weeks ago, I took a week-long training course on MySQL development. The course was fantastic, but extremely intensive. I learned quite a bit about using MySQL.

In addition to all of the MySQL development I picked up during the course, I was also privy to some “inside” information about Sun’s possible acquisition of MySQL.

First of all, although it is 99.9% sure that Sun will acquire MySQL, it’s not an absolute certainty, yet. There is still quite a bit of negotiating to be done before the acquisition goes through.

Secondly, although a lot of people seem to think this acquisition spells doom for MySQL and its open-source, free software, it should be an extremely good thing for MySQL and Sun’s products. Rumor has it that Sun decided to acquire MySQL because of the incredible experience MySQL has monetizing open-source software. Sun has had trouble with that proposition since the beginning. MySQL has done fairly well with it.

Sun decided to pick up MySQL as much for their business sense in the open-source software world as for the product they produce.

On a side note, while this probably won’t do anything phenomenal for those of us interacting with MySQL through PHP, developers using Java will probably have a whole lot more support and tools at their fingertips than ever before.

Over the next week or two, I will be posting my notes from the MySQL developer course. They might not make a whole lot of sense, but hopefully they’ll do somebody some good. I know they’ll do a lot of good for me in the future. Hopefully I’ll be able to get certified in MySQL before too much longer.