Jan 16th, 2007
The VMWare killer?
InnoTek yesterday decided to release [link] their virtualization software [wiki] VirtualBox as Open Source. It looks very promising and if it manages to become a successful open source project it might well overtake VMWare. I installed the Ubuntu Edgy package, and played around with it. Ran into a permission problem but the guys in their IRC-Channel were very helpful and it was solved quickly.
Quick HOWTO for installing it on Ubuntu Edgy
1. Download and install the deb-Package for Edgy Eft from the project page. [link]
2. Add your username to the group vboxusers by running in a terminal
sudo adduser YOUR_USERNAME vboxusers
3. Reboot your machine (I am not entirely sure why this is necessary. However I wasn’t able to access the vbox kernel device until I rebooted even though the permissions were correct.)
I have been looking for an alternative to qemu [link] for Elke. She needs to use a program that’s only available for W** and getting it to run on Wine was unsuccessful. So she’s had a QEMU virtual machine for it. The whole QEMU-accelerator thing got on my nerves however, first because it isn’t open source and second because the installation is very uncomfortable and it works unreliably after bigger system updates.
Anyway, compared to that, the installation and use of VirtualBox is absolutely painless and theres a nice GUI with some functions that are much less comfortable on QEMU. So I installed W**XP and her software on a VirtualBox Machine and the performance increase is massive. The graphics don’t flicker and support the widescreen resolution of her laptop, the mouse works smoothly and everything feels more, well, solid.
So, thank you Innotek. I’m impressed and I wish you a lot of success with this project. I should think that there will be many developers jumping at this project since it is already such a stable and usable product. I’ll certainly be a loyal tester.
Things they could get started on:
- copy/paste across guest and host
- fixing the Ubuntu package to solve the group membership problem
That IS progress. Your blogging skills are getting better and better. I had a great time reading this post.