[Discuss] July meeting: "The Virtual Desktop" -- VirtualBox does not have tools built-in to run a VM as a service

[Brendan Kidwell]

I noticed that the program for July's meeting is to talk about
virtualization on the desktop.

A while ago I found myself wanting to run a headless Windows VM on my
Linux desktop at work and have it start and suspend automatically when
I start and shutdown the host. My efforts towards a solution are
documented here:

   http://www.glump.net/howto/virtualbox_as_a_service

I wrote up an init.d script template based on Ubuntu 8.04's init.d
script skeleton file, and it worked pretty well for me. This script
currently doesn't work in the latest Ubuntu. I'd like to spend some
time in the next month to make this as generic as possible or at least
make working branches for Debian/Ubuntu and for Fedora-based
distributions, and put up on GitHub.

If this service controller script would be of any use to BLU folks I'd
like to have the floor for a few minutes to show it off during the
July meeting if that's okay with you Jerry (the presenter).

Brendan Kidwell