VirtualBox

[bigearsbilly]

GOOD NEWS ALL ROUND!

well, this is not a problem rather a piece of very good news.

I just made the VirtualBox port on an AMD64
FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE #0
and it works beautifully.
network and all.
have installed,

Win XP
puppy linux (excellent)
slax
dos6.22 & windows 3.11
knoppix

so for those flash browsing problems, and if like me you are out
of work and need MS Word format CVs it's great.
(no abiword doesn't work)

[SirDice]

(no abiword doesn't work)
Odd. I made my resume in AbiWord. Nobody complained. :e

[bigearsbilly]

did you get the job?

well, it sort of works, but I've had issues.
it doesn't always open them properly either.

if only MS W*rd didn't exist.
In the old days I could do it in text mode.
;-)

[SirDice]

did you get the job?
I did.. I have to admit though, it was for the position as a UNIX engineer :e

More on topic, I'm thinking of giving VB a shot. Any hints/tips/caveats you'd like to share?

[rhyous]

Great news on VirtualBox, I will have to try it.

[jnr]

I like VirtualBox a lot more than qemu+kqemu+aqemu which I used previously. It would be a lot nicer with working bridged networking, though :)

[bigearsbilly]

Well SirDice well done!
all of a sudden the word is all "open-source" amongst the idiot manager types and I can't get a position unless I'm effing Red Hat certified or I have used X-Linux not Y-linux.


anyway SirDice VB is so easy to use, just remember to add users
to the vboxusers group and:

mount -t procfs proc /proc
kldload vboxdrv
kldload vboxnetflt

the GUI is a doddle to use.
one tip is to dd your install CDs onto disk.
then it will install much much faster. (xp about 10 mins)

jnr yes VB is much better, qemu is so slow.
I don't exactly know what bridged is, but I tick bridged in the adapter menu and I get network no problem. I can use the proxy on the host.
can't seem to mount NFS though.
with NAT you get a 10.0.2.* address bridged a 192.168.1.*.

[SirDice]

A bridged nic would mean your VM will get a connection on your physical nic. So when you do DHCP in the VM and on your host both will get IP addresses from the same pool. This is usually the easiest to use and you will have direct and full access to your LAN.

[Zare]

What's with "shared folders" option, it doesn't seem to work.

[aragon]

Shared folders are brilliant. You share a directory from the host, and access the share via windows networking in the guest. Great way of sharing data between host and guest.

[jnr]

What's with "shared folders" option, it doesn't seem to work.

You have to mount it on the guest OS. If I make a share called "home" I mount \\vboxsrv\home as a network drive in Windows.




jnr yes VB is much better, qemu is so slow.
I don't exactly know what bridged is, but I tick bridged in the adapter menu and I get network no problem. I can use the proxy on the host.
can't seem to mount NFS though.
with NAT you get a 10.0.2.* address bridged a 192.168.1.*.

My understanding of it is Bridged will get the guest OS its own IP on the LAN. I've been having some problems (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=7631) getting it to work, unfortunately.

[bigearsbilly]

well, as for IP it does bridged, or NAT.
so you get a 192.168.1. (on my home 192.168.1 net of course).
or a 10.0.2. with nat.

shared folders - I haven't tried as I think you have to mount,
so a linux or windows won't be able to mount bsd.
(I could be wrong, read on below)

I prefer to NFS mount directories from the guest linux, that works fine. NFS is easy.

Also I have downloaded a mysql query browser on my XP guest
and connected to my FreeBSD database, cool!

(first time i've used XP at home for about 5 years)

I'm going to look for some PC viruses now for a laugh!

[Zare]

You have to mount it on the guest OS. If I make a share called "home" I mount \\vboxsrv\home as a network drive in Windows.


Yes, i know. Altrough bridged network works perfectly, i can access everything on the host machine (for instance SSH), and i see my fileserver's samba share from guest OS (XP), i can't ping vboxsrv, and i don't see it in network browser.

It's written in VirtualBox documentation that i should see "shared folder" listed in guest XP's "entire network" view - that's not the case.

[jnr]

It's written in VirtualBox documentation that i should see "shared folder" listed in guest XP's "entire network" view - that's not the case.

The same thing happened to me with a Windows 7 Pro guest. I just did this on the command line:

net use H: \\vboxsrv\home /persistent:yes

[bigearsbilly]

Zare,
to see the \\zboxsrv you need to mount the guest additions
CDROM iso images found in:
/usr/local/lib/virtualbox/additions/

you mount it as a CDROM and windoze picks it up and loads mouse, screen and the virtual network.
then when you press map network drive in explore it
will pick up \\vboxsvr

It also installs a graphics adapter which I found messed up the
resolution, so you can disable it in the windows hardware thingy.

the guest additions have linux stuff on it too.

honest, i'm not an MS user, not had it on a computer I own for over
10 years!

edit: of course this may not work for win 7

[Zare]

Thanks, i'll try it out later.

I thought that guest additions don't work on FreeBSD port. Is OpenGL 3D support full?

[jnr]

You might not have the guest additions disc image on your machine unless you checked the option to install it when you installed the port. The additions work fine for me in Win7 with the exception of 3D graphics. I'll know as soon as that nvidia driver comes out :)

[Zare]

Yes, that was the problem. I thought additions don't work on FreeBSD so i decided to build that port without them...forgot about that later.

In any case, everything is working like a charm now, thanks! And btw, there is no 3D acceleration in guest system, dxdiag says that Direct3D is disabled.

[bigearsbilly]

oh, I keep getting core dumps.
:-(
sleeping thread.
mind you I get random screen freezes too with no dump.
i'm trying on linux now to see if it's the same.
i hope i don't have to go back to linux, i lurve freebsd.

[noobster]

My VirtualBox also crashes once in a while (on 7.2) and it seems to depend on what I'm running. Windows XP runs fine, but Ubuntu 9.04 makes the system hang frequently. So now I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and it works a lot better, but still once a week the whole system freezes.

[bigearsbilly]

well I've been getting freezes and reboots more often than I'd like.
VB seems to precipitate it.
I'm going to try linux for a while to see if it's the same.
I hope it's the hardware.

[roy2098]

Just wanted to report some (so far) outstanding success with VirtualBox.

Went to FBSD v 8.0 to remove kldload vboxdrv page fault issue; this was documented and reported by Wietse Venema (I don't have the exact link but it caused me to move to 8.0).

System running on Proliant DL380 G3 hardware dual 2.X proc; 4 gig RAM. I'm getting at the VB servers via X Windows using Cygwin on Windows. Did not need hald or dbus for this to work (hald causing huge cpu spike)...

So far CentOS-5.3 is running like a charm but I haven't gone much further than this. No crashes or freeze-ups, just works well but I haven't tested anything esoteric other than enabling ssh access with the ExtraDataItem command.

Excellent work! Thanks to everybody who made this possible. What a great platform to run VB...!

[bigearsbilly]

aah so there is an issue with vboxdrv!
I thought it would be a vbox port issue rather than bsd problem.

shame, I don't want to move until 8.0 is a proper release.

thanks roy

[roy2098]

Per Wietse Venema: vboxdrv has an interrupt problem that goes away with v 8.0 ... I wish I could provide the exact link wait here it is: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=139188