Doth quoth the DaveM

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First VirtualBox experience

Wednesday Feb 13, 2008

Yesterday we at Sun announced we are acquiring Innotek and their VirtualBox software. As someone who runs OpenSolaris in a VMware virtual machine on my home PC, I decided to give VirtualBox a try.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the installation package for Windows is quite small, around thirty megabytes or so (yes, I remember when that would be considered large). It installed easily and I was able to start it up and create a new virtual machine to install Solaris in very little time. The virtual machine wizard allows you to select machines for many operating systems, more than VMware.

I then tried installing Solaris Nevada 79a, a preview version of the latest SXDE release. I got to the nice install GUI, it started installing, but somewhere along the line decided it couldn't read the rest of the yet-to-be-installed packages from the DVD. Weird. I didn't try it again, as I had other things to do, but up to that point it was pretty smooth. To be fair, I'm not convinced this is a VirtualBox problem at this point, as I had problems with installs of Solaris Nevada 79 on VMware.

The other thing I found difficult to figure out was how to get 1280x1024 screen resolution. It appears to default to 1024x768 or even smaller, and VirtualBox complained about the 24 bit color depth and suggested I use 32, 16, 8 or 1. It seemed to work anyway, though.

At some point I'll try the install again and give a bit more detail about the various warning and error messages. So far VirtualBox seems okay, but I'm not going to abandon VMware for my personal use at this point.

[2] Comments

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Posted at 12:46PM Feb 13, 2008 by DaveM in Solaris
Tags: nevada opensolaris solaris virtualbox virtualization vm

Comments:

I've been using VirtualBox since Feb 2007... so for a whole year now, and I love it. I find it faster, and easier to configure... the new challenge is getting an OS/2 guest installed :-)

Posted by weeble on February 14, 2008 at 01:31 AM CST #

I'm very interested to see this latest Sun acquisition. A great move providing it didn't cost too much (I think 1 billion for mysql was pretty steep...). I have been using virtualbox pretty much since they released an open source version and while it's obvious I like it (otherwise I'd be using something else!), things seem to move pretty slow. Networking is also a real pain, and with smp not even on the cards I admit I am constantly installing other products to try them out. Anyway, I didn't even get to the graphical install screen when trying the live cd on 79a! (on a kubuntu x64)