Virtualbox

masterluke · 20 Sep 2008 at 10:52

Hi,

Just a quick heads up in case anyone hasnt tried this fantastic software. I've just installed under Ubuntu and got an XP machine up and running in it.

My main motivation was getting 4OD to work - which works perfectly. I was also surprised to see that it plays all my movies very well - Including 720p MKV's!!!

This is well worth an install if you have any windows apps that you cant get running natively on Linux or WINE. With the "seamless" mode it looks just as if apps are running natively.

Luke

masterluke · 20 Sep 2008 at 16:05

NicNac said:
I got networking working pretty easily on the linux version. vmware is good also I have both installed.

I didnt have to do anything to get networking working in XP under Ubuntu.. It just worked out of the box with XP set to use DHCP.

Im sure Vmware is a good product too, but from the reading I'd done it seemed that Virtualbox was faster and speed is the major consideration for me as I wanted it for video mainly.

masterluke · 23 Sep 2008 at 20:15

NoobieOCer said:
i have problems with it, when seamless activated and i select the windows task bar the masked part goes black, then when i select ubuntu part windows back ground appears.. =/ maybe i did something wrong?

Wierd.. mine doesnt do that on my Ubuntu. Using fully updated hardy with latest Virtualbox installed using the .deb package from the Virtualbox website. I'm using the restricted Nvidia driver on a geforce 5200 and advanced desktop effects disabled.

I use seamless mode and set the XP taskbar to audo-hide, all works nicely.

Sorry cant offer much in the way of help

masterluke · 24 Sep 2008 at 18:22

This is what seamless mode looks like on mine.. (the background is the Ubuntu one not the windows one).

I downloaded this version (its compiled specially for Hardy)

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.2/virtualbox-2.0_2.0.2-36488_Ubuntu_hardy_i386.deb

masterluke · 24 Sep 2008 at 18:42

no drag and drop.. you need to map a drive still.. there is a shared clipboard though.

Check this out.. a 720p MKV playing without any frame drop in seamless mode using the xp version of media player classic

masterluke · 24 Sep 2008 at 19:00

Mattus said:
Gaming is probably out of the question. All the VMs I've used have no / very limited 3D acceleration.

VirtualBox is nice and fast... I'd use it if it allowed me to create an SMP VM with two virtual processors like VMWare does.

Yeah gaming is a no-no as the directx support is a bit limited.

I'm not 100% sure i know what you mean about SMP, but XP can see and use both of my cores on Virtualbox.

masterluke · 24 Sep 2008 at 22:51

Mattus said:
Do you have two graphs in task manager? I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

you're right.. it only shows the one graph. I'm sure I had both cores working before. I may be mistaken.

EDIT - on looking carefully it looks like XP identifies the CPU description as a dualcore, but only actually sees 1 core.

masterluke · 24 Sep 2008 at 22:59

tntcoder said:
Yer definitely, Im getting it now, will do some tests tommorrow. Might be able to get rid of wine! Probably wishful thinking though

cool please report back on how you get on

thanks

masterluke · 30 Sep 2008 at 17:23

LabR@t said:
are all virtual box os's limited to 800x600 ?

no - i have been able to run in any resolution ive tested. My native resolution is 1360x768 and that runs fine. I think maybe you need to install the virtualbox's guest drivers to get high resolutions.