Notes on VirtualBox

[Jerry Feldman]

On 04/18/2010 11:19 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
> On 04/18/2010 02:26 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
>  =20
>> Would love to hear others' comments.
>>
>> -rich
>>    =20
> Yup.  I've been using VB for several years now and have similarly found=
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> it to be excellent.
>
>
> I haven't used VMWare in anger in a long time.  But when I did have to =

> use it (VMW Player) recently, the things that stood out to me about it =

> that was very inferior to VB was a) the closed source aspect of it, and=
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> b) the installation process.
>
> Since it's closed source, there's obviously no package for it available=
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> via my distro.  And installation basically consisted of letting the=20
> installer - running as root, mind you! - do whatever it wanted to my sy=
stem.
>
> At best, my package manager had no knowledge of which files it=20
> installed, which is annoying.  At worst, the installer could have=20
> completely hosed my system, compromised its security, etc., and I would=
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> have had no idea what it did, or why, and so no idea how to fix it.
>
> I put up with such things under Windows, but I refuse to do so under=20
> Linux - especially when there's an open source app with the same=20
> functionality that works as good (if not better).
>
>  =20
I've been using VirtualBox for a long time. Recently, I've had a problem
running a 64-bit guest OS on VBox 3.1.6 as it tells me that my
processor's virtual assist is disabled although it is enabled in the
BIOS. I recently installed QEMU with KVM, and QEMU/KVM did work, but
with no sound from the GUI. I deinstalled QEMU, and reinstalled VBox,
and when I saw this email, I was able to boot a 64-bit guest OS. I found
that for a desktop VMM, Virtualbox and QEMU/KVM perform better than
VMWare Workstation, but as a caveat I have not personally benchmarked
VMWare for a few years. Currently I have Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 and Windows
XP (32-bit) running simultaneously both have sound. One annoyance with
QEMU/KVM was that it always prompted for root access although there is
probably a solution for that. VirtualBox uses 'vboxusers' as a group.
Both KVM and QEMU have entries in /etc/group.

BTW: VBox also comes with several utilities such as the ability to
convert a VBox .vdi file to a KVM image file.



--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
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