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.

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.

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.

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