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Re: Virtual Box



 


On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 10:04 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote: 
> 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 
> 
> --Sig_/2LibuRjab3nBf/Tj5==fTpo-- 
> 
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