[Hampshire] Virtual Box

Hi,

Yesterday rather than attend the LUG meeting as I had intended, I stayed at
home nursing my cold. When I wasn't feeling too bad I had a go at installing
VirtualBox for Linux on my Debian Lenny system.

It's another virtualisation package like VMWare, Xen, and Qemu. This one is
more like Xen and Qemu/kqemu in that it's a para-virtualisation application,
and best of all it doesn't require a new generation CPU with virtalisation
hardware.

I installed the open source edition (OSE) directly from the Debian
repositories. Everything goes went in without a hitch. Like Qemu/kqemu you
need to prepare and auto-intstall the kernel component for your kernel with
the debian kernel module assistant tools yourself. Then you need to remember
to add yourself to the vboxusers user group and modprobe for the vboxdrv
module.

Unlike qemu which doesn't come with GUI tools it's self (though there are
third parties), virtual box does. You start virtual box and like all the
other tools, you create a file system container as a file on your system,
allocate memory and NAT networks, CD-ROMs and floppies and so on.

Yesterday I installed Windows 98 without a hitch, but couldn't get the machine
to work correctly with the virtual box graphics system. Windows NT4 worked
much better in that the Virtualbox graphics and networking worked out of the
box.

Compared with Qemu/kqemu I'd say that both versions of Windows booted and ran
much faster than Qemu, but I had a lot more problem with drivers and such,
the virtual hardware on Qemu seems to he handled by the client better than
VirtualBox. I'll try some Linux clients today.

Why do I do this? just to play Age of Empires, which I've never got to work
under WINE, so I run it under Windows in a VM. Ironically I actually own both
Windows and game, but if it's the only way to play the game, then so be it!

--
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK

Stupidity maintained long enough is a form of malice.
    -- Richard Bos's corollary