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Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine
goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.
Umm, yeah. Did you get the memo?
but yeah, in the last few months, it's seen some polishing (particularly the Macintosh features).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware, and coupled with the far less demanding system requirements (at least for the VM software itself, it doesn't do much to reduce guest sys requirements, of course :P), I haven't used VMware for over a year and half now.
The best virtualization I've found for windows hosts. Works great - I run Vista Ultimate host & Ubuntu guest in seamless mode on my laptop and everything is still fast as hell!
I'm happy.
Free, GPL AND open source? All in one package? However do they do it?!
It looks like a viable candidate for a VM, but still a bit behind the leaders. VMWare and Parallels seem to be better choices if you can afford them, but hopefully being free as in beer and GPL will allow it to catch up rapidly and make the ongoing competition even better. If they can get 3D graphics card support running, I will be looking really hard at VirtualBox.
The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.
The weird thing is that the boot time for XP in the virtual machine is shorter than on the real one.
I find this to be an excellent VM that continues to make a lot of progress. After using VMWare server, Bochs, and QEmu, this one really takes the cake on both performance and usability. Virtual machines are easy to set up using a nice graphical interface, and all of the bells and whistles require no extensive configuration (sound, mouse integration). Running a Gentoo hardened Linux on amd64? No problem. Some of the features that really put VirtualBox above the rest for me:
Best of all, it's FOSS.
Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up. It seems like they've been busy giving away the keys to the castle so to speak, but it never seems to be enough. What does everybody have against Sun?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
on how to run Windows Vista preinstalled on a separate partition from VirtualBox (itself running on linux)?
I tried (not very hard) to follow the docs, and failed dismally.
tia
"demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware"
what? i have been running vmware on my linux workstation at work for years and recently switched to virtualbox and realized that virtualbox is in orders of magnitude snappier, faster and less ressource-intensive than vmware.
just the fact that mouse support works absolutely flawless in vb is an enormous advantage over vmware. i am not even going into how much i/o wait vmware seemed to cause all the time which vb simply doesn't (yes the settings are comparable:>)
NEVER will i go back to vmware again (at least not on the desktop)
I checked the site and it says that the OS X version is still in beta. Any 10.5 users tried this yet? Specifically with XP?
"and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries"
I was under the impression that no virtual servers support advanced/3d graphics.
Please tell me I'm wrong, and I'll uninstall my copy of windows today:)
So, can I run my xbox through it? I need to be able to run simultaneously:
1) xbox halo
2) mac for screen grabs and skype
3) red hat terminals for server access
4) windows for outlook and skype
Plus, I need to be able to take screen grabs in any one of these virtual environments and save them into one or more of the others.
Bonus points if it has 'arrange by penis' for the desktop environments.
davejenkins.com |
That bussiness model seems pretty fair to me. Release the code GPL, free binaries for non commerical use, and sell the binaries for corporate clients. They are essentially charging companies for the time and expertise it takes to compile it. And presumably it means they only have to offer support to paying corprorate customers.
A nice thing about that model is that it caps the price at the value added. Think sun is charging too much? compile it yourself and support it yourself. The value contained in the code itself, and value added to the code by unpaid GPL contributors, is not part of the price this way.
And that's a very nice way to make money off GPL. You're not cheating the contributors at all. And anyone can go into competition with sun for the compiling. So it comes down to charging for the value added by sun in compiling and servicing it.
Not quite the same as RedHat's model but highly simmilar
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Does it emulate whatever Apple hardware OS X checks for, or will it still need a patched OS?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
No 64-bit support in released versions. No libvirt driver (yes, there's a fancy C++ API; libvirt is simpler and easier and has bindings for everything).
It's fantastic for running a Windows desktop VM -- particularly with the seamless-mode support -- but has no place anywhere near my QA lab.
for benchmark information about virtualbox vs kvm vs vmware workstation, you might be interested in http://dipconsultants.com/press/24508-1/
It's not odd if you look at it from a contribution standpoint.
The FOSS community contributes to VirtualBox directly through help with development, testing and bug fixing on the project, as well as indirectly through their efforts on all the other FOSS projects upon which VirtualBox depends, including toolchains and mountains of utilities. Availability of source code is clearly not optional for this.
Windows binary users get a bit of a free ride on the back of all that hard work, so instead they contribute to VirtualBox by providing a bit of cash. They don't need access to the source code nor a build environment for this, and what's more, in the Windows environment it's very normal and expected to pay for your packages.
So, the VirtualBox product offering seems quite well adjusted to its two communities, and quite fair as well.
They lose a little on each sale, but they make up for it in volume.
I too ran into this problem where I wanted the OSE (Open Source Edition) GPL binaries on Windows. I already had Visual Studio installed, so that wasn't a big deal, but one of the requirements to build is having the MinGW g++ compiler, so now you have a situation where you need two seperate c++ compilers to compile the thing, which is kind of wierd. On top of that you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and the Windows Driver Kit, along with several open source libraries (ok, needing various library dependencies is kind of of par for the course though).
After finally getting everything downloaded and unpacked into a build tree, and getting all the command line arguments for their configure script (so it would know where to find all the libraries), the build process ran for about 1/2 hour then died with a type casting error related to the USB device driver. Now, according to the VirtualBox website, the USB wasn't even supposed to be part of the Open Source Edition (and I suspect that might be part of why I got the errors - because it was expecting it and it wasn't there).
I asked on the VirtualBox forums and developer mailing list, and after a week someone said that they got it to build by commenting out the 2 lines that generated the build error. But now I'm *very afraid*. A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness). I have no idea what the long term effects of commenting out those two lines of code are, so I wouldn't be comfortable distributing the OSE binaries I built to anyone anyhow.
On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).
Does this thing run the VM as some sort of hypervisor underneath the OS or does it piggyback the other OS's on a parent OS.
If It's a hypervisor like thing where all the OS's' are symmetric then I guess it must be getting in the way of my "normal" OS and limiting it to single core?
If it's not a hypervisor/symmetric VM and one OS is the master, Do all the OS's have full access to the hardware functions. So for example if I my mac is the master OS, and I set up a firewall set, does the windows OS have to go through the mac's firewall (and thus be protected better) or does it have direct access to the ports itself. If the latter who negotiates the conflicts when both want the CD or audio port.
Finally, are the VMs portabel from machine to machine. Or even platform to platform.
So If I create a VM on one machine, save it's state and open it on another machine, does it just run? (even the network settings?) What if the second machine was say an AMD and the first an Intel. What if the first host was a mac and the second host a linux machine?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've been running it since before the InnoTek acquisition. They do not currently support 64-bit guests, though they claim it is in the works. It does however work on a 64-bit host.
not yet, maybe in the future. You can run virtualbox in a 32bit or 64bit host, but can't run a 64bit guest OS.
Read their editions page. The "extra enterprise only" features include USB support (even 1.1) and a SATA controller.
http://virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions
VirtualBox's greatest failing is that in using QEMU's I/O and networking code, they've made it a royal pain to set up bridged-mode networking on Linux hosts. You get to write two scripts, to add and remove a TAP device from a host-side bridge, and get to set up said bridge on the host yourself. Not only this, since the 2.6.18 kernel you need to run VirtualBox VMs as root (or set up sudo with /etc/sudoers not to prompt for a password and use it within your scripts), because only the superuser can manipulate the TAP/TUN devices; chmodding them writable by a particular privileged group is insufficient.
Compare to VMware, which handles all the bridging etc. by itself—much more convenient to use.
Then there are VirtualBox's "Guru meditations", obscure ERROR_MESSAGES_THAT_LOOK_LIKE_THIS and provide minimal information, often requiring perusal of the source code to figure out what's wrong. This is entirely unsuitable for end users as well as people whose time is valuable.
Finally, I tend to run a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace. VirtualBox does not support this combination—it's either 32-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace or 64-bit kernel with 64-bit userspace. (VMware on the other hand does support 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace; its failing is that [as far as I know] there is no non-beta 64-bit userspace for VMware yet, though this will change with the release of VMware Server 2.0 and VMware Workstation 6.5.) This is only really a problem on Debian and Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu, whose package manager (dpkg) is too incompetent to handle multiarch properly, despite work ongoing for about four years now, so the user has to set up a 64-bit chroot environment. (Fedora, RHEL and CentOS get this right; rpm can handle multiarch properly, so it's only a matter of installing the appropriate libraries there.)
VMware also supports 64-bit guests on certain processors. VirtualBox doesn't support 64-bit guests at all.
So in my view, between the two, VMware still wins, open source or no open source.
Except when you're using iSCSI as the backing store.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
In unrelated news, your local thrift shop is offering free open source toasters, although it can only toast 1 slice of bread at a time. I'd imagine with a power strip you can line up several of these toasters to toast more bread at once. Cheers!
I spent a lot of time trying to get VirtualBox to play nice with FreeBSD. I'm much more familiar with BSD-flavored *nix (esp re: creating jailed environments), so I run a FreeBSD box as a cvs server for the programming classes I teach. I planned on migrating this function to a virtual machine this year. Unfortunately, VirtualBox would go down in flames every time I did a build-world. Web searches availed little.
I tried using OpenBSD instead, but that ended up being worse. The install looked something like
I eventually had to migrate my partially-finished FreeBSD disk to VMWare and finish my work there. It's a bit of a bummer, because VirtualBox does appear to have some really neat features, especially for XP guests. Still, I gotta use what meets my needs.
A few months ago I switched from using VMWare Workstation 5 and VMWare Server for virtualization to VirtualBox. This choice was driven by a couple of factors:
1. VMWare's lack of support for newer versions of Ubuntu, requiring downloading some weird patch and hoping it works. It usually did, but still annoying.
2. Licensing issues with VMWare server periodically expiring and taking down my web server virtual machine, which I otherwise would ignore.
I've got to say, I've been pretty impressed with VirtualBox -- it's not quite as feature filled, and getting some of the networking stuff working requires additional steps -- especially for bridged networking, but it seems to work nicely. On average, however, the VirtualBox VM takes a bit more CPU on the host than the VMWare ones.
So, most of the stuff had been good so far, with the exception of audio recording issues in OneNote. That is, until I gained certified status as an enemy of the state in the FSF's eyes and picked up an iPhone 3G. Apparently, there are some weird USB issues with iPhones that make syncing not exactly trivial -- in fact, it doesn't work at all. iTunes doesn't even recognize my phone. From what I've read VMWare player 6 can handle the iPhone. I haven't decided if a once a week reboot to sync my phone is worthy of switching back, but it certainly something that is a downside.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
'nuff said
Kurt
I use it right now, on a Kubuntu host, to run XP. I run VS 2008 and Sql Server 2005 for development. I love it. I get the economic benefits of using windows when necessary, but don't have to put up with windows as my main O.S. Bravo to Sun and InnoTek.
On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
Depends whether their copyright holders (Microsoft) considered that binaries linked against them comprise a derivative work. Best check their respective licenses.
You should also consider whether the works you distribute use any of Sun's trademarks or patents; if so you will need a license to use them (or you will need to remove the offending trademarks and code implementing the patents from your compiled version).
I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).
I'm curious to know: were you trying a released version, or an SVN checkout? And did you file a bug report? That's a better way to bring your problem to the attention of the developers than posting on a random forum.
Besides, developing software on Windows will always be an unpleasant and frustrating experience. Those who undertake it deserve at least my sympathy, and if they want to charge for the result then I don't have a problem with it.
If someone else comes along and decides that Sun are charging too much, they can always improve the build process (of course, Sun might not accept the patches back... we know they are, TBH, terrible with regards to actually managing the interaction between non-Sun contributors and Sun developers in their open source projects).
At the end of the day, I guess I don't really care, because I don't use Windows. All I have to do to get it running is install the virtualbox-ose package. If I want to build it myself, I have only to run dpkg-buildpackage. Maybe some day Microsoft will catch up.
You're talking about Sun Java VM, right? I didn't know it was open source now.
Name a company that doesn't get bashed here. Everybody has somebody pissed off at them. Sun actually does pretty well in Slashdot discussions compared to, say, SCO.
Besides, where's the bashing in this discussion? Sun has a product. Some people say they like it. Some are less enthusiastic. Not exactly a lynching.
I swore by VMware for the longest time until I stumbled across VirtualBox.
It is much, much faster on my machine. Damn near the same as if it was installed on the hardware.
If I ever actually needed Windows for more than Photoshop (CS2 now runs fine under WINE).
One feature I am looking for (and have not found yet via reading the net) is if it's possible to use a physical disk instead of a virtual disc.
It's really handy trying to install pfSense on a flash drive (the dd method doesn't work)... although there are other uses I could use it for, too.
Anyone who wants to spoil that buisness model can take the trouble to build good binaries. Once the source is GPL, nobody can prevent you from building your own binaries and making them free.
Bruce Perens.
I actually set it up (XP on XP) to test streamed unattended XP installs Nlite, and at that stage I wasn't too worried about 3D support or USB as I knew that any hardware issues were virtual in any case.
What bugged me was trying to set up a virtual shared folder and getting the guest additions to work (providing seamless mouse transitions).
Eventually one obscure forum thread suggested installing it twice which fixed the problem.
Interesting to read here that it may not support USB and 3D, so the next time I play with it I'll give it a go as 1.6.2 seems to have USB support.
I've been blindly recommending Virtualbox as an alternative to dual booting XP over Vista - so I need to check the hardware compatibilities.
Also, I think that the systems I'm likely to use it on may have problems with the ACPI Linux bug.
Recently I was testing Acronis recovery manager boot disk which is Linux based, and failed miserably on a Gigabyte board.
So I wonder if Virtualbox can also reflect bios issues on boards which may be incompatible with certain OSs?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
holy cleopatra, i've just been doing ./vmware-install.pl on my new ubuntu install, good coincidence. So I think i'm going to try this out! Seemless mode = web developer's dream!
That would be "Idiots can't write English."
And, by the way, no one care's.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Only one thing its still missing from SUN VirtualBox... 3D delegation to the the OpenGL in the host and the windows video driver that routes Direct3D calls to the Host OpenGL
Damn near everything else works fine under Windows 2000, even games that swear they won't.
What exactly does this need from XP that Win2k won't do?
Every time I hear someone moan about Vista and that XP is fine, I shrug. Win2k is to XP as XP is to Vista. Why the hell would I want to my machine to run 20% slower, use more ram and have even more useless bloat and phone-home crap?
Meh, back on topic: I've found VirtualBox to be pretty good under Linux. Yay for InnoTek.
(returns to lurking, get off my lawn)
Yes. In fact, for those few people who still need OS/2, VirtualBox is one of the few that do support OS/2. At least one major company runs a significant amount of its infrastructure on OS/2 guests running inside a VirtualBox VM on a Linux host.
VB is fine for business type applications - networks, disk, number-crunching. You can play videos, using the built-in graphics and sound emulation. However I have run into a brick wall trying to get USB peripherals such as cameras, scanners, printers and a USB sound card to work to a guest. The latency is just too high.
As for games or intensive work, forget it - keep this on the host.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I wanted to use MD RAID 0 volumes as native drives in (FreeBSD) guests with vmware workstation on SLES10, but that was a non-starter for reasons that should be obvious to anyone else who has tried the same thing. (Novell and vmware pointing fingers at each other, nobody wants to fix it. Novell whines that it's "broken" proprietary software and I wonder why my company is paying them big $$$$ for support, and vmware claims MD RAID volumes aren't really native hardware.)
Someone suggested v'box instead. The shared file system looked like the answer but the FreeBSD guest can't use it (yet). I dl'd the source to try to build the FreeBSD guest driver and tools, but, as others have noted, building their stuff from source is not a straightforward process. Among other things their /bin/sh build scripts are really bash scripts and even if I use FreeBSD's bash, it falls down. Haven't gotten around to trying the /bin/{sh,bash} in linux compat yet. No rpm in linux compat either, and linux compat in FreeBSD 7.0 is still only FC4. FC4, wtf, that's fscking ancient.
I asked for some hints on how to get started on the v'box forums and was deafened by the silence of the non-response. Made me wonder if Sun's recent big RIF caught all the v'box people!
So they're emulating an Intel cpu with software that runs on an Intel cpu? Why can't they build a virtual machine for my g4? That would be something to be impressed by.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
I'd be interested in DirectShow apps. Cause I'm surprised they have HD video (WM11?) playing.
Both VMWare and Parallels give me a blank screen when I run heavy video that uses DirectShow.
not off topic.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In fact Innotek credits their decision to use the GPL licsence as one of the major reasons their product took off in the first place. It was bought by Sun later on.
That's what's called an open source success story. Maybe the poster should have mentioned that. This being /. and all.
Last time I heard, Virtualbox didn't allow VPN connections.
How sweet would that be? You could run Windows or Mac OSX apps on your PS3 under Ubuntu or YDL.
I've been using virtual servers since the mid-1980s. When Sun released the E10K line, I was re-introduced to virtualization. I've used AIX, HP, Sun, vPar, LPAR, NPAR, Domains, slices, vmware server, VirtualBox, Xen, UML, and a few others that slip my mind at this second.
I attended a VMware Conference last week, but I'm not as familiar with their line as I think I should be. My personal use of VMware Server was less than stellar. It was heavy on Windows machines and unmanageable on Ubuntu since every kernel update broke the virtualization - Every time. It was probably something that i did wrong. Whatever.
Xen - I've been happy using it on Ubuntu on very modest hardware. It is rock solid running email, dns, NAS, and Ruby servers. Rsync for backups from outside the VM. I'm addicted except I wish the host/Dom0 memory footprint could be reduced. I've gotten it down to 120MB. Zero network issues. It just works and I love that I can patch from outside the VM. I just wish there were a tiny distro with enough networking and mdadm support to host lots and lots of DomUs.
VirtualBox - I dropped this onto my laptop last spring. It didn't need a reboot (unlike vmware player or server)!!! That tells me a bunch! I loaded DSL and PuppyLinux VMs - and fought with the networking. Eventually, I ended up with a bridged network and was able to communicate with the outside world. When I switched away from a Linux VM, the CPU (power management) never slowed down when there wasn't anything running. The performance was fairly snappy. It is easier for me to ssh into my servers than use a Virtual Box VM. Would I run a bunch of VMs on a server in VirtualBox? Nope. Xen works better for me, my hardware and my needs.
VMware certainly has the edge on all the other products, especially with the change in cost for ESXi - it is free now. VMotion is fantastic! VMware has some serious limitations that aren't well publicized. For most enterprises, they won't have an issue, but for a small company without any HW budget for IT, buying "supported" hardware to support RAID in ESX may not be possible. We certainly don't have a SAN attached to an EMC DMX4 either. Our hardware RAID isn't supported by ESX. You can do RAID inside the VM, but for small instances, why would you want to? Xen on Linux lets me use almost any drives and use Linux SW RAID on Dom0 - here's other reasons why I like it better: http://linux.yyz.us/why-software-raid.html
VMware has other complementary products - VDI is very interesting. I'm looking forward to deploying productivity desktop VMs on existing hardware rather than being forced to downgrade to Vista when we don't want it.
Xen runs Windows-XP on current CPUs, Core 2 Duo and later. Getty up!
I don't know why it's so fast in some areas (or alternatively, why is VMWare so slow) but VirtualBox is definitely faster.
-- Sig down
Qemu is the best of VirtualBox, which is why I'd pick Qemu *over* VirtualBox any day.
Networking is simple with user-mode networking. Most people don't *need* bridge-mode. If you do use bridge mode, it works using standard Linux networking stuff, not some proprietary mess like VMWare. Regular users can do TUN/TAP devices just fine, BTW.
Luke-Jr
I'm doing THE EXACT SAME THING. I rarely run Vista though, because it seems slower and more pointless than XP. I mean, all the windows apps I regularly need seem to run very well in an XP VM. But alt+ctrl+-> over 3d across a cube back to my emerald/compiz/hardy installation is BEAUTIFUL. Highly recommended.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Urban Terror runs PERFECTLY under wine (there's also a Linux native version that fails to run for me), is superior in every way to counterstrike, and is total free (as in beer). So rather than counterstrike failing to run in a VM, why not try Urban Terror in wine? I have an OLD machine, and I still get 100+ fps even under compiz.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
You haven't tried ZSNES in a VM yet, have you? :)
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
At least when you compare it to virtualbox, anyway, it suffers from the same old Sun style "open source shareware software" model in which there is a proprietary version with more features. I really wouldn't find a single use to virtual box if it wasn't for the USB support. It stinks that it is a feature for the proprietary only version.
In comparison to VMWare, virtualBox is quite nice, I have had a better experience with virtual Box in both windows-host-Linux-guest and Linux-host-windows-guest cases.
But it is a little offending to see the summary give all credit to Sun, Innotec did it all, Sun just bought it, and if you ask, Sun pretty much lowered the quality of the product. Now it annoys you with presumption of it being 'Sun' and got renamed to "Sun xVM VirtualBox" which is qutie a lame name.
BUT the largest issue is that seamless windows have just stopped worked correctly, they used to respect gnome-panel and actually put the windows taskbar in a way that didn't overlap with gnome-panel. Now it just takes the full screen in a totally unusable way (since gnome-panel is always on top, it makes it very hard to access maximized stuff and the taskbar, unlike the previous incarnation of seamless windows, before Sun). It is so bad that it is quite useless, got reverted to using the VM embedded in a window.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
hookups to scanners and printers. Except for OpenSolaris and W98SE (explicitly not supported), I've had working scanner and printer support on every OS (Kubuntu/Ubuntu V7 and V8, OpenSuse11, XP) I've tried Sun Virtualbox v1.6.2 with. I've been using it to review operating systems for publication. If I'd had a scanner and printer that worked with OpenSolaris, I think it would have worked just fine there, too.
Linux webcam support is problematic whether you're trying to get it on a real or a virtual machine. Has your webcam worked on any Linux physical box you've tried it on?
I'm planning to replace VMware Server with VirtualBox completely on this box. (Debian Lenny host)
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
The GPL has an exception for operating system components
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The great thing about VMware is that they do binary rewriting on guest kernel code. That is, they inspect code running in ring 0, detect parts that behave differently based on CPU privilege level, and insert equivalent code that works in user mode. This also allows them to (theoretically; I don't know how much they do it in practice) detect regions where the VM overhead is performing crappily, and effectively optimize the guest kernel. AFAIK they're the only ones that do this, and their competition (Xen, HyperV) instead rely on either hardware virtualization extensions (which is slower) or a modified kernel which directly makes calls to the hypervisor.
So, does Sun's product do the binary rewriting? It's just about the only competitive edge VMware has left, especially considering that the 2.0 release of HyperV is supposed to catch up to them in all other areas.
A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness)
Not actually. There were no build errors. The package manager used an automated process to search for references to memory in unallocated areas and fixed the problems the process found. Unfortunately, those references were used to increase entropy in the system and the result led to an insecure key generator.
Put identity in the browser.
I use either VMWare and VirtualBox on all 5 of my local machines and 1 dedicated server. Each appears to have strengths in different areas.
For *nix and servers, VMWare works quite a bit better IMO. Drive access and networking both seem quite a bit more stable. I run a VMWare Debian LAMP to mirror my dedicated server for testing, Solaris for coursework, and a few different flavors of BSD just because. I can run as many machines as will fit into available memory with no appreciable hiccups. VirtualBox wouldn't do that, I wasted most of a day duplicating the VMWare setup using VirtualBox and when I started putting it through the paces everything bogged way down.
However, VirtualBox is the only way I would want to run an XP VM. The ability to directly and seamlessly share directories with the host OS (Ubuntu Hardy) is really nice. The only problem I have is occasional problems with reading from the drive, it seems to have trouble with more than 2 file operations at once. It is mainly used for Netobjects Fusion and the occasional MS-type-file that OpenOffice doesn't render properly.
Since they can both run at once, I never have to shut down the VMWare Debian LAMP on the development machine when I fire up the VirtualBox XP instance. My wife uses XP in VirtualBox on her Linux laptop for the occasional ActiveX website and opening MS-type-files that OpenOffice won't, and has no problems with it. The interface is smooth, and with the option for "seamless" integration it really reduces Windows to the role of "just another application running in the taskbar" especially with Alltray and the ability to start the VirtualBox XP VM automagically in the background via the command "alltray VirtualBox -startvm Windows_XP" in a launcher on the taskbar.
Comparing VMWare to VirtualBox is like comparing pilsner to lager. They are both damned good, but sometimes I want one, sometimes the other.
One man's opinion.
VMWare bloats your memory, even if you're not using it. It loads several services that just sit there.
Virtualbox is just short of being an install-less tool. Shut it down and it stops using any computer resource (except some HDD space of course).
And yes, I also thing it runs faster than VMW (no need for fancy graphics and such)
It does.
Much the same as vmware by the sound of it.
If you didn't mean to make it a pun don't capitalize "Sun". Never add "no pun intended" when writing, it's pompous, rude, and by writing it you are trying to tell me I'm not smart enough to understand homonyms. The only time you should ever use it is if you are speaking and say something that may give offense to the listener, a quick assurance to them that you did not. In addition, if you do ever write it, it's just telling me you are too lazy to rewrite the phrase in a form which wouldn't require it. People that write "no pun intended" are really just homonyms trying to make an assonance of themselves.
I tried VirtualBox just 2 weeks ago (v1.6.2?) and it ran fine. My problem was that I needed to use a VPN from within the vm, but that won't work through the default NAT setup they provide. In order to setup networking to do anything useful you have to manually configure a bridged device in Linux. If you've never tried to get a bridged device in Linux working, you're not missing any fun. Don't even think about trying to do this with a *wireless* device!
At the end of the day I was able to get the networking setup, but it required hours of researching Google, wasn't entirely stable (because it used rc.local scripts to apply changes), and couldn't make use of the wireless.
So, I gave up and went back to VMWare which provides a GUI for doing all that. It took about 30 seconds to have it working.
Further, to anyone that thinks VMWare is slower than VirtualBox...it is but only out-of-the-box. Set the memory use setting to keep everything in RAM rather than swapping and you'll find it speeds up 100%. For some reason or another VMWare does a lot of disk swapping if you don't force it to keep everything in ram...
This was my idea while using iSCSI with VB (except using LVM snapshots, but same idea - the backing stores are actually 20GB 'dd' raw files for performance and flexibility), except that it's a pain to snapshot the whole RAID array/zpool for a single VM, and it's just one more PuTTY session that I have to leave open to execute a snapshot every hour or so. Granted, ZFS has much more flexible options than LVM, but it would be great to have an integrated interface accessible from the GUI. Nothing breaks my concentration better than alt-tabbing and desktop switching to find a window/app.
I know I'm nit-picking, but it really was a turn off for me when I realized that I'd have to repartition and setup LVM for the same functionality that I already have on VMWare on both Windows and Linux. The reason I started to look at VB in the first place was for its native iSCSI support, so that I didn't have to deal with mounting directory structures on two desktops.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Or if you just want to run it you could type "sudo apt-get install virtualbox" to get it installed.
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
I run VirtualBox on my work machine (XP Host) so that I can test the sites I develop against Linux browsers like Konqueror and Galeon (and so I can use Windows as little as possible ;). I tried using QEMU before, but VirtualBox takes away a lot of the complication. Plus, Seamless mode is an excellent way to test web sites.
My only complaint is that it doesn't support a virtualized Windows 2000 system just yet - unless I just haven't figured it out.
If you can't distribute binaries freely, the software was not released under the GPL.
Ok, my point still stands though - if you make even seemingly small changes to a source tree to resolve warnings or errors, and you don't really understand the full impact of those changes, you could be making a very bad change, and not even know it. The main point was, that the tree as shipped by the VBox developers was not compilable, and the only advice I got to fix the compile issue is. . . suspect methodology, let's say.
Calling your software 'open source' because you make *unbuildable* source code available for download under the GPL is really lousy. Legal, but lousy. No, this wasn't a CVS snapshot either - this was the officially 'released' version of source code available from Sun at the time (2 or 3 weeks ago). That wouldn't build.
Yes, I was using the latest (at the time - about 3 weeks ago, might be a new release by now) 'release' version of the source code available from the official virtualbox.org website (which just sends you to a Sun download site for the download), NOT a cvs snapshot. I know that cvs snapshot are often prone to problems, and you can't hold that against the developers - it's a work in progress. But the 'release' version of the GPL code tree should compile without requiring users to make changes to the source code to fix type casting errors. That seems either sloppy at best, on the part of the VirtualBox developers, or malicious, at worst, that the release version was released in an unbuildable state.
I wasn't arguing your point, just clarifying so that no one picked your comment up and repeated it.
I know that the GPL client source and binary are available on Debian (and I guess Ubuntu) as virtualbox-ose. It lacks a couple of features, but the Debian boys got it to compile. You might try the deb-src from debian.org.
Oh, and I agree that releasing unbuildable stuff sucks, but it may have to do with the compiler Sun uses vs. the one you use. Not sure, but it might.
Put identity in the browser.
What really surprises me (and maybe shouldn't) is how so many people in the forum makes a judgment on this product because has read "sun microsystems" somewhere in the post (and obviously have not read the article).
I feel the urge to look up "pun"...
No, your point does NOT stand.
Removing stuff that you don't use or ever want to use is not exactly going to screw up your box. In real open source stuff, source code is edited ALL the time.
Or are you a case of bitching about "GPL this and that" for the sake of bitching? Don't like it, don't use it. This is their first supposed release, so what do you expect? Linux 0.1 didn't exactly compile everywhere.
And complaining about "does not compile on Visual C++" is kind of dumb. Visual C++ is not the same compiler as GCC. GCC has different extensions, has better support for lots of C++ crap. The world does not revolve around MSVS.NET 2008.
You kind of missed my point completely.
"Removing stuff that you don't use or ever want to use is not exactly going to screw up your box. In real open source stuff, source code is edited ALL the time."
Yeah, the thing is, I never got a response, as far as I can tell, from one of the V-Box developers as to the correct way to fix this. I commented out two lines based on two comments, from two different people, both of whom seemed to just be struggling with the same problem I was and they said, well, these two lines caused the compile error, so we commented them out and it compiles, and appears to work correctly.
My point is that, I am a beginning programmer at best - I understand basic C/C++ syntax. The only help I was able to get building the software is by commenting out lines that I don't know what the true impact of commenting it out will do, by people who didn't appear to be VBox developers and I'm not confident they truly know whether that 'fix' is safe or not. The example I gave about the Debian developer was because, while I might have been a little confused about the exact changes made to OpenSSL, I knew that basically two lines in OpenSSL were changed, and changing those two lines broke OpenSSL, but broke it in such a way that it compiled fine, and appeared to run correctly, but didn't really. How do I know that I haven't built VirtualBox with some similarly subtle problem that isn't obvious, but is critical?
I had to do this because the core VirtualBox developers didn't release code that was buildable based on their build isntructions, which brings me to my next reply. . .
"And complaining about "does not compile on Visual C++" is kind of dumb. Visual C++ is not the same compiler as GCC. GCC has different extensions, has better support for lots of C++ crap. The world does not revolve around MSVS.NET 2008."
I never complained, exactly, that it doesn't build on Visual C++ - I followed the oficial VBox instructions to the letter, which REQUIRE me to use Visual C++ and the GCC port from the MinGW project(although, to be fair, I suppose it might not be up to date with the latest features of GCC - it could be based on an older version). I would have *preferred* if it built entirely with GCC, but, I suspect that VBox developers are forced to use VC++ for certain code which interacts tightly with the Windows O/S.
Anyhow, the Sun developers somehow got it to build for their non-GPL binaries just fine. I very strongly suspect this is not a Visual C++ error as you attribute it. You know why? Because the code that failed to compile had something to do with USB (I don't know what exactly, but it definitely mentions USB in the function names), and the Open Source Edition is not supposed to *have* the USB support built into it. I think one of the developers forgot to do something while 'cutting out' the USB functionality from the GPL code-base. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that this was a mistake, and not intentional, but how hard can it be to setup a 'clean' computer and follow the same build instructions that you put up on your website, to make sure the source tree builds? Granted, they have no legal obligation to do so, but it certainly wins them no friends.
I'm glad they released the source code as GPL, don't get me wrong, but it just seems awefully suspicious that the binaries are not GPL and simultaneously, the official source release won't build when you follow their exact build instructions, putting all the software they say you need, on your computer. Again, it could be an honest mistake, but it gives the appearance of trying to make it difficult for other people to get the OSE built and running instead of the 'official' version.
Linux 0.1 not building isn't a valid comparison here, because VirtualBox is actually a pretty mature product, whereas that was a brand new project that was *only* intended for developer use until it could become more mature.