Doth quoth the DaveM

Sound in OpenSolaris on VMware

Monday Sep 22, 2008

One of the things missing when you install OpenSolaris in a VMware virtual machine is audio. Apparently the driver for the audio device that VMware emulates isn't redistributable, so it isn't included as part of OpenSolaris.

To solve this, I grabbed a copy of the Open Sound System drivers package and followed the installation instructions. After a reboot, I had sound.

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Posted at 01:44PM Sep 22, 2008 by DaveM in Solaris
Tags: audioi opensolaris solaris sound virtualization vm vmware

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.

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