Virtual Box

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 5.3

See Centos 5.3. Bug in X means screen driver in Guest Additions doesn't work as required.

Ubuntu 9

First tried on the Mac, see Networking below, I used synaptic to install smbfs.

Ubuntu 8

The screen resizing now seems pretty solid. All my U8 images do a full screen resize.

Ubuntu 7

This has a full screen mode and a vnc client launcher. I don't use this anymore.

OpenSUSE

The 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 Server

I 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 5320m

A 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 Disk

Lets 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 11

To mount the cdrom if you are using a server edition,

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Networking

So 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.

VRDP

Virtual 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.

• VirtualBox Community Forums
• my posts at the vbox forums, I may need to be logged in for this to work.
• VirtualBox Group Blog
• The Fat Bloke
• Veritable Vijay
• VirtualBoxBuzz