Virtualbox for Mac

I had downloaded and tried VirtualBox a few months back (actually pre-Leopard), but it didn't work for me at all.. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, and OpenSolaris also, but I only wanted to see it on Mac. I had tried installing Knoppix but it just wasn't coooperating so I put it aside for another day. Recently I downloaded 1.5.51 and tried again; this time it all went smoothly.

Emboldened by this success, I decided to try something more challenging: SCO 5.0.7, which Parallels has so far failed to achieve and VMware managed only without networking. Alas, VirtualBox wasn't up to the task either: the SCO install crashed and brought down VirtualBox with it.

Oh well.. I don't need that. The Knoppix install shows that it works, and gives me enough to check out the features.. which are admittedly minimal, but are also sufficient: you can create a virtual machine with dynamic hard drives, up to four ethernet adapters, shared folders, and snapshots.. what else do you need?

Well, how about being able to send the screen somewhere else? VirtualBox apparently can do that too: you connect to it with an RDP client and there you are.. that's pretty neat, actually.

When I first started this, VirtualBox popped up a registration form. As I really would like to be notified of updates and so on, I did want to register.. but that crashed as shown in this snapshot:

In a way that annoys me more than not working at all would.. I really do want to be notified.. oh, well - maybe next version, right?

Other than that, so far VirtualBox has done what I want without complaint or glitch.. I didn't try it with Windows, but I suspect the developers pay a lot of attention to that, so it's probably fine.

I'm sure VirtualBox will get even better over time - this is only version 1.5 after all. But even right now it's probably perfectly fine for most users. I like it..

Comments /MacOSX/virtual-box.html


Wed Apr 2 18:19:03 2008: Subject:   drag


I've been pretty successful with VirtualBox on Linux.

At least Virtualbox-ose (open source edition). Using Debian Lenny/Sid it's pretty easy to just go apt-get install virtualbox
Just got to make sure that the kernel modules are installed also. The module is vboxdrv and in Debian you get the proper permissions for a user if you add them to the vboxusers group.

Once you get it installed and XP or Linux or whatever running then you can go through the GUI and install some of the drivers for the hosted operating systems. That makes integrate a bit better into your existing desktop.

The one big feature that is missing from the OSE version, from what I seen, is lack of USB support for forwarding USB devices from your regular PC to the hosted operating systems. Other then that I haven't noticed anything missing.

Sun May 11 04:25:36 2008: Subject: VirtualBox for Linux   Matt
http://www.windserve.com/

I've also had trouble with VirtualBox on OS X, to the point where I now use VMWare Fusion instead when I'm on the Mac. The good news is that VirtualBox runs much more smoothly when the host OS is Linux, so it's my full virtualization solution of choice there.

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