I downloaded the Windows 8 release preview and set it up under VirtualBox 4.0.12 on my 4-core AMD system running Ubuntu 10.04. (I’m “this close” to switching that system to XUbuntu 12.04 now that I seem to have found an alternative to the new “improved” Gnome that is in fact UNUSABLE Gnome.) Windows 8 installed very quickly and with an impressively small number of inputs on my part. But when I tried to shut the VM down and save the session it hung badly, and for the first time in my experience, VirtualBox has a process running that doesn’t respond to a “force quit” GUI action. It did respond to a kill 9. This was with the 32 bit version of W8, and I realize I specified “Windows/other” but maybe Windows/Windows 7 (32 bit) would be a better choice. I made this choice and reinstalled and then did a shutdown of Windows (spending only 3-4 minutes trying to find the interface for this, giving up, and finding the secret on the net: hover around on the right side of the screen to get the “charm bar”, click on “settings”, then on “power”, then on “shutdown”). Now I can start up W8 each time under VirtualBox. However it’s still the case that trying to just save the VM state for a quick restart results in a VB failure dialog and another hard to kill process.
The Windows 8 user interface is astonishing and I’ll leave judgments of that for others. My goal now is to determine what the device support situation is.