Windows 7 Beta on Virtual Box 2.1 on Apple Mac
Well installing the Windows 7 Beta on top of Virtual Box 2.1 on my Apple MacBook Pro wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Virtual Box pretty much made it a snap quite frankly.
Started up Virtual Box...
- Selected "New"...
- Chose "Windows" and "Vista 32-bit" from the operating system options...
- Entered "1024MB" or 1GB for virtual memory size for my new virtual machine...
- Bumped up the video memory to "64MB"...
- Told it I wanted to start a "New" virtual hard drive and used the default of "20GB" for it...
- Edited the settings for DVD and Audio... mounted the DVD drive that contained the Windows 7 Beta DVD I burned from the ISO the other day... configured the audio for "Core Audio" and "Sound Blaster 16" driver...
Then started the virtual box...
Windows then began to load and start the install process from the DVD. Neat. Notice I said "neat" not "fast". My MacBook Pro isn't the newest or fastest so it wasn't speedy for the install but still was acceptable. I'll have to repeat this on my iMac that *is* newer and faster to see if things improve.
Results so far...
- Sound did not work. I will have to change the driver or install the VBox Guest Tools...
- Network worked fine and Windows even found 2 updates, installed them and then rebooted
- Changed my login picture and my theme...
- Bumped video memory up to 128MB, checked "enable" 3D acceleration
VirtualBox Guest Tools
- Attempted to install VirtualBox Guest Additions and it came back and said "unsupported" OS
- Un-installed the additions
- Re-installed using XP compatibility mode... so rather than running with AutoPlay, right clicked into preferences --> compatibility --> Windows XP 32-bit, then ran the VirtualBox Guest Additions
- that's much better now... video driver scales the display when I resize it and mouse works across windows
Audio
- Changed audio back to default of "Core Audio" and "ICH AC97" ... upon reboot Windows 7 found the device and installed the device driver... dummy me for not just taking the defaults... doh!... works like a champ now.
Suspend / Resume
- So far suspend or resume isn't quite working
And VirtualBox 2.1.2 is released today! Get your copy at http://www.virtualbox.org
Dave,
In 2.1.2 (released this morning) there's a specific Windows 7 entry in the dropdown when you create a new machine, i.e. where you chose Vista.
And the 2.1.2 guest additions work without needing compatibility mode.
But good to see you worked all this out yourself ;-)
-FB
Posted by The Fat Bloke on January 22, 2009 at 04:15 PM EST #