Virtual Box

["Jerry Feldman-2" <user=4@nabble.blu.org>]

 There was some discussion at the last meeting regarding Virtual box 
1. http://virtualbox.org/
2. Virtual Box is a fully GPL'd virtualization product that runs under 
either Linux or Windows. 
3. It is roughly equivalent to VMWare Workstation. 
4. There are RPMs (and .debs) available for most distributions. The 
latest release is 1.5.4. 
5. I easily installed it on my laptop (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon AMD64 2GB), 
created a Windows XP virtual Machine and installed Windows XP. I have 
not experienced and performance issues. 
6. I installed it under SuSE 10.3 on my desktop system at home (Athalon 
32-bit 1.2Ghz and relatively low memory (3/4 GB). Again no performance 
issues. 

I installed this out of curiosity. I initially had VMWare Server 
installed on my laptop and removed it because of performance issues. 
The original reason for virtualization was that my wife wanted to use 
it for the Big Brother feeds under Real Player which are not doable 
under Linux. While I was able to access those from the VM, the video 
portion would occasionally freeze.  While I don't have this requirement 
any longer, virtualization is a big thing in the industry today, 
especially in the enterprise where they can consolidate a number of 
legacy apps on modern hardware. I had planned to replace VMWare server 
with VMWare player, but player does not have the capability to create 
VMs, you must acquire prebuilt VMs which is ok, but since I heard about 
virtualbox, I decided to install it and was a very simple install from 
Synaptic on Gutsy. In SuSE, I downloaded the RPM directly from 
2. Virtual Box is a fully GPL'd virtualization product that runs under 
either Linux or Windows. 
3. It is roughly equivalent to VMWare Workstation. 
4. There are RPMs (and .debs) available for most distributions. The 
latest release is 1.5.4. 
5. I easily installed it on my laptop (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon AMD64 2GB), 
created a Windows XP virtual Machine and installed Windows XP. I have 
not experienced and performance issues. 
6. I installed it under SuSE 10.3 on my desktop system at home (Athalon 
32-bit 1.2Ghz and relatively low memory (3/4 GB). Again no performance 
issues. 

I installed this out of curiosity. I initially had VMWare Server 
installed on my laptop and removed it because of performance issues. 
The original reason for virtualization was that my wife wanted to use 
it for the Big Brother feeds under Real Player which are not doable 
under Linux. While I was able to access those from the VM, the video 
portion would occasionally freeze.  While I don't have this requirement 
any longer, virtualization is a big thing in the industry today, 
especially in the enterprise where they can consolidate a number of 
legacy apps on modern hardware. I had planned to replace VMWare server 
with VMWare player, but player does not have the capability to create 
VMs, you must acquire prebuilt VMs which is ok, but since I heard about 
virtualbox, I decided to install it and was a very simple in Synaptic 
under Gutsy. In SuSE I downloaded the RPM from http://virtualbox.org/
and simply rpm'd it. You also should grab the Guest Additions package 
once you install the guest as this gives you more flexibility. 

The bottom line here is that this is a good FOSS product that supports 
most Linux distros. You can also install it on Windows hosts and run 
Linux as one of your virtual machines.  I may take this approach in 
some future installfests as an alternative to some Windows users since 
shrinking NTFS file systems sometimes is time consuming and risky. 
(Vista does have a utility to do it as does GParted and QTParted). 

One question that was asked by JABR was can you run an application 
under the guest os that shows up as a separate Window under Linux. I 
didn't understand what he was asking at the time until he mentioned 
Exceed. Exceed is a an X server for Windows and allows you to run a 
Linux/Unix app on a server and have it display in its own window under 
Windows. AFAIK,  neither VMWare nor Virtualbox allow an application 
running in a virtual machine to display as a separate Window in the 
host. That window will be constrained to the guest os windows under the 
host, but the guest os may also be set up as full screen. But, if there 
is a Linux guest, you can use X to do this. If the host is Windows, you 
would need to install an X server such as Exceed or Cygwin, or Unix 
Services for Windows. If the host is a Linux host, you already have 
that feature. 

Another question is can you get to the guest's virtual drives from the 
host os.  The answer is no since the disks are vurtualized within each 
VM, but... with a Windows guest you could mark a directory drive as 
shareable (you can do this using the Windows Explorer), and your shares 
will be visible to the Linux host. In the same manner, with a Linux 
guest, you can use Samba to share directories to Windows hosts. 
-- 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> 
Boston Linux and Unix 
PGP key id: 537C5846 
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 
_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss