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First VirtualBox experience
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.
Posted at 12:46PM Feb 13, 2008 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris | Comments[2]
Strange interaction of VNC and ssh on recent Nevada build
I recently started using Solaris Nevada (first build 75 and now build 76) rather than Solaris 10 Update 4 on my Ultra-45 at work. I usually have a VNC session to which I connect from home and occasionally from work. But since I converted to using Nevada I've occasionally had xscreensaver tell me that it can't open the display. This makes it impossible to unlock the display and I have to go either kill the VNC server or just kill xscreensaver.
This morning when this happened it finally dawned on me to check my Xauthority file. For some reason I checked the XAUTHORITY environment variable and much to my surprise it pointed to a file in /tmp that didn't exist. Example:
$ echo $XAUTHORITY
/tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
$ ls -l /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
ls: /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile: No such file or directory
Huh, go figure. I realized at this point that I had connected to my work system from my home system using ssh with X forwarding. It appears that at some point the Nevada sshd was changed to use a temporary file for XAUTHORITY, and this change hasn't made it back to S10.
Now I start my VNC sessions by ssh without X forwarding or directly from my desktop X session, where XAUTHORITY is not set. I should probably do something with the env command to set up a known environment, but for now this works.
Posted at 04:42PM Nov 02, 2007 by Dave Marquardt in Solaris |