Virtual Box
Sun Microsystems bought Innotek, the authors of Virtual Box, am opensource virtualisation product. It permits Windows/Linux/Solaris guests on the same operating systems plus MAC O/S.
Sun's Product Page.
Did I install this on the
Alienware?.
NO!
Problems
Centos 5.3See
Centos 5.3. Bug in X means screen driver in
Guest Additions doesn't work as required.
Ubuntu 9First tried on the Mac, see Networking below, I used synaptic to install
smbfs.
Ubuntu 8The screen resizing now seems pretty solid. All my U8 images do a full screen resize.
Ubuntu 7This has a full screen mode and a vnc client launcher. I don't use this anymore.
OpenSUSEThe downloaded disk (11.3) is well behind the repos, since you need to download some additional packages its important that the kernel, source and headers are in sync. The
VBox How To states that you need
dkms, binutils, gcc, make, patch, libgomp, glibc-headers, glibc-devel, kernel-headers, kernel-devel OR kernel-pae-devel. OpenSUSE uses zipper not yum.
I waited a while and then issued a
zypper refresh command. I then started to issue the compile statements, but was still getting failures. I ran the
zypper install for the string above and dkms and libgomp fail. They can't find anything sutiable. I am running this on a W7 64 bit host and this asked for kernel-devel not the pae version. I don't know if the kernel libraries had been updated before I issued the refresh. Any way the shared folders compiled.
Sept 2011.Ubuntu 11 ServerI installed it at home, and it couldn't find the dhcp server, (interesting, is this the cause of all the Vista shite!), so installed with static network addressing. When I got to work I changed it, with help from the
Ubuntu Networking page.
I checked that the samba service was running it was. Rebooted the Server, up it comes and I have server VM advertising itself on the network.
I installed dkms, build-essential and linux-headers-generic using apt-get. The Guest Additions then compiled the windows install failed, this is to be expected.
HP Probook 5320mA 64 bit CPU, with Windows 64 bit, a 64 bit .iso. Does it work, does it fuck! There is a Virtualisation Technology switch in the BIOS i.e. Virtual Box won't work in 64 bit mode as shipped. This is not good.
Share DiskLets get this fixed so we can use it. For
Linux Guests, see
Help with Shared Folders VB 3.0.6 at
http://forums.virtualbox.org. Using the -o flag allows mounting as a non root user. I have created a folder on the file server to act as a common filesystem on all vbox clients. This will be mounted on a directory called /no50. I shall use smb on the remote linux clients. I have used vboxsf on the file server's own guests. Each host will have a folder, that will be mounted on /host. This requires a script in /usr/local/bin, invoked by rc.local.
mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 ${sharename} ${mountname}I need to create a global network share, and a host system share for the guests to consume.
In
Sept 2011, I had another look at this and re-wrote the mountshares script to use the -o flag. I have also written an installer. It is LSB compliant and tested for syntax and function on
Ubuntu 11To mount the cdrom if you are using a server edition,
mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
NetworkingSo far all my work is with XP as the host.
I install specifying the ethernet card and NAT networking mode. This means that the container can happily use the network. I want to work out how
- to install software servers such as ftp or snipsnap in a container, and make them available to remote systems, either other containers or distributed systems.
- connect to systems over a host initiated VPN.
This is no longer true, I have installed a copy on the Mac and also several VM's on my Citihub works laptop. VBox 3.0.12 bridged networking seems to work out of the box.
VRDPVirtual Box now has this as functionality to support remote desktop. I tried to get this working with a MS Windows XP Home host and a Win 7 Client. There seems to be a configuration issue with the host. I have not yet got this working with external i.e. host authentication, nor from the ipod touch. I asked for help at the virtualbox.org forums in a thread called
Help with connecting using VRDP. I shall return to this one day soon.
Resources.
Don't use FAT filesystems to host VDIs on XP.
In my early experimentation with Virtual Box, I installed an Ubuntu 8.04 image on an XP FAT Filesystem. On my Dell, I came across an instance where the update manager claims to have run out of disk space. This is almost certainly because I have mounted the VDI on a FAT32 file system. I have created a volume of max size 32 Gb volume. This will probably fail when virtual box attempts to exceed the 32 bit word size limit. Changing the filesystem to NTFS made this problem go away. I used the microsoft utility to do this. See