VirtualBox v1.6 - Open Source desktop virtualization

By David Stewart (Intel) (83 posts) on May 14, 2008 at 2:12 pm

VirtualBox is a great desktop virtualization solution. It's free for personal use / evaluation, runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Solaris or OpenSolaris, and supports a huge number of guest OS's. The user interface is really well tuned for a simple desktop user, and as UI's go, I think it has some really good context-aware help.

I was running VirtualBox 1.5 for some months, and it is a great way for me to run OpenSolaris on my Windows laptop(or run Windows on my OpenSolaris desktop for that matter). Great functionality and performance.

They just recently released VirtualBox 1.6, and they added the "Guest Additions" feature support for Solaris and OpenSolaris. This means I can do things like Windows integration, which allows me to view guest windows in the host OS. (ie, an OpenSolaris window just looks and acts like a Windows window). This is really cool beans, and it installs great and works great!

The only missing feature in the Solaris Guest Additions is the Shared Folders between OpenSolaris and Windows. This is supposed to be fixed in the next release, which I think is in about a quarter.

The one criticism I have about Guest Additions: to install these in the guest required a bunch of searching around on my part before I finally located it. (It turns out that when you install VirtualBox, the guest additions .iso file is present along with the VirtualBox .exe, which in Windows is in Program Files.) Just read the user manual, it has the goods there, but was just hard for me to find with a quick scan, it took some effort to find it.

In some competing proprietary VM software, adding the guest additions is quite simple, I think you just click a button. And if you don't have the guest additions installed, you get a little nag on your screen when you start up guests which have not been so enhanced. This would be a good improvement for VirtualBox.

Good job Innotek!! I like these bits.

Categories: Open Source, Virtualization

Comments (5) Comments RSS Feed

By Calum on May 14th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
>In some competing proprietary VM software, adding the guest additions is quite simple, I think you just click a button.

It's the same in VirtualBox... just choose Devices->Install Guest Additions from the VB menu, and it will mount the appropriate ISO on your OpenSolaris desktop.

By Sergio Schvezov on May 15th, 2008 at 3:25 am
someone beat me to the post, well it's there in the menus too. They also rebranded VB, it no longer has traces of Innotek

By A Chaotic Flow of Open Source Ideas on May 15th, 2008 at 6:35 am
links from TechnoratiVirtualBox v1.6 - Open Source desktop virtualization

By David Stewart (Intel) on May 15th, 2008 at 7:53 am
You are all, of course, correct. In my haste to find the information, I didn't read it clearly in the manual to see that there is indeed a menu which supports adding Guest Additions. I don't know why I didn't see THAT, but did see the part about hunting down the .iso and mounting it, ie the manual way to do it. Maybe some documentation improvements are needed... :-)

By Kenneth Cavanaugh on June 26th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I would like to install virtualization software on a notebook that has a CPU that supports Intel VT (T2400). Does Virtual Box support Single Root I/O Virtualization?


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