VirtualBox

[ewx]

I thought I'd try out VirtualBox.

I installed it on my Mac and to start with installed Debian etch inside it. This went pretty smoothly. One disappointment was the lack of support for 64-bit guests despite my having a 64-bit host (since I have a perfectly good 32-bit etch install, another one in a VM isn't especially useful.) Also it does not appear to expose more than one CPU to the guest, which is starting to look a bit old-fashioned given the spread of multi-core CPUs.

Having installed the guest additions, the mouse integration is good but not perfect. Cut and paste between host and guest works well (and indeed is better done than between Apple's X11 and its native window system!) but while the guest is focused, even though the pointer can leave the window, the mouse buttons are captured. This means that, for instance, if you normally have button 4 bound to Exposé then it doesn't work, which is a little surprising if you often use it to switch between applications. It'd be nice if this could be configured on a button-by-button basis (perhaps it is but if so I've not managed to find it).

Similarly, the host screen's corners (which normally activate Exposé or Spaces for me) don't work while focused on the guest.

The default video memory of 8MB was too small for the large screen I wanted but once I'd expanded it the guest was happy to use higher resolutions. The biggest obstacle was actually Xorg's unhelpful error reporting, which is hardly VirtualBox's fault.

I next tried installing a Windows XP guest on a Linux host, so that Naath could have a conveniently available Windows install (currently she borrows my dual-boot Mac for this purpose). However this did not go well: the guest hung on several occasions and sometimes so did the host. Eventually I gave up and deinstalled.

Finally I tried a Solaris 10 guest (back on my Mac host). Initially I asked for the (default) interactive (i.e. GUI) install, but this is either impossibly slow to start up or hung, so I gave up on that and tried a text install in a console session. After considerable pain (mostly Sun's fault) this produced a Solaris install; I could log in and get a GUI but I was unable to mount a CD and after a while it went to a black screen and wouldn't give me back a desktop, and then hung during reboot. Again, I gave up.

One out of three usable guests is not an encouraging result l-(

Comments

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

An opensolaris guest on a linux host worked for me first time.

One area I tried which i found badly documented was setting up port forwarding through the default NAT setup. You can do it, but only via the command line tools, and if it doesn't work there's very little information on what's going wrong.

My debian guest worked nicely but I wasn't testing the GUI side.

I found installation significantly easier than the last free virtual machine product I tried, which was vmware several years ago.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I didn't try OpenSolaris, that might work better. I did try FreeBSD in a Vmware guest a while back and that went OK; I since installed Xen on the same machine (and created a bunch of Debian and Ubuntu guests with very little pain), but Xen and Vmware don't seem to like being on the same host, so I now use a spare PC for FreeBSD when I need it.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I want to give Xen a go as well. VirtualBox looked like it was easier for quick experimentation.

[3c66b.livejournal.com]

I have Windows guests running on several Linux (etch) hosts at work with no problems, to the extent that my desktop machine now has a Virtualbox Windows environment open nearly all the time. I tend to run later kernels than Debian etch stock, though, so I wonder if that's making a difference.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Possible I suppose, though the manual doesn't qualify its support for etch that I can see.