It's one of my default: i cannot prevent myself to see what's in the box we sell or promote to our customers. Of course, that's not always possible due to time constraint. But, this time i tried VirtualBox from Innotek, which is now SUN.
My laptop is dual boot partitionned with Windows XP and Solaris Express build 82 (aka Nevada). I only use Solaris Express and scarcely Windows.
The reason why i tried VirtualBox on the Windows partition is that the OpenSolaris version is in Beta. The VirtualBox OpenSolaris compiled version needs a 64bit processor, which is not the case of my laptop. More information is here (Thanks Joe) for the VirtualBox for OpenSolaris.
My intention was to run Solaris Express build 82 as guest in a Virtual Box running on a Windows XP host.
So first you download the VirtualBox from VirtualBox site. It's only 17MB.
They are some tricks you have to know the first time. :
- Choose 512Mo of RAM for the VM
- Choose a dynamic disk with 6GB
- For the Solaris installation, choose a console installation (option #4)
- Remap the Ctrl key in Preferences to Ctrl + Alt if you are on a laptop without a Ctrl+Droite key. This way you'll be able to switch from VirtualBox to host operating system.
And here is the result, Solaris Express running as a guest in a Windows host:
So, i can now compare with QEMU, which i installed last year and described here.
To summarize, i can boot my laptop:
with Solaris Express and then run QEMU when i want to run Windows on top of Solaris.
- with Windows XP and then run VirtualBox when i want to run OpenSolaris on top of Windows.
Can't you also run
* with Solaris and run VirtualBox to run Windows on top of solaris
?
Posted by Dick Davies on February 20, 2008 at 04:41 PM MET #