virtualbox.org

I have just installed Ubuntu 8.10 on a Gateway M-6337 Laptop. I seems to work fine.
I want to run Win XP on a virtual drive. I have had difficulty installing XP as a dual boot because of the SATA driver. There is no floppy for the driver and slipstreaming has not worked.

I don't mind the performance hit as I don't game: Word, Excel, Eamil, java programming for school, etc

Is VirtualBox a good way to go on Ubuntu?
I need relative simple instructions on how to set it up. I have done UNIX command line work years ago - but that has faded.

Please advise. Thanks, Y'all, from GA.

Just try it, install Vbox, make an ISO from your xp disk, mount it and of you go.

it works fine for me (actually it's very impressive), I have it running on an e1705 laptop with 1GB of ram.
I used the xp cdrom mounted in the vm manager.

The only problem I had is that I had to disable the network interface in the vm manager to get it to finish the install...and even now if I have the cdrom mounted in Ubuntu then xp will lock up when it starts, apparently because the cdrom is going to sleep and not responding in time for xp. Resetting the vm solves the problem.

Don't forget to install the guest extensions once you get xp installed.

also I installed the Intel 1G desktop network drivers and just for fun I'm running it with apic disabled.
some people have reported problems with usb devices but I'm using a usb mouse and I have a USB drive shared by the host OS (with an internal system disk).

It's running like a charm for me.

I'm glad that they made it fully OS, though.

Thanks TouristGuy. That was a helpful answer. I am reading the manual before installing, but have decided to go ahead.

The user Manual says on page 20:
You will need to install the following packages on your Linux system before starting
the installation (some systems will do this for you automatically when you install
VirtualBox):
• Qt 4.3.0 or higher;
• SDL 1.2.7 or higher (this graphics library is typically called libsdl or similar).
If I need to do this – How do I do it?

Next the user Manual says on page 21:
First, download the appropriate package for your distribution. The following examples
assume that you are installing to an Ubuntu Edgy system. Use dpkg to install the
Debian package:
sudo dpkg -i VirtualBox_2.1.4_Ubuntu_edgy.deb

Where do I get these and how do I install them?

Barrett, please check the front page, it has a nice download section for you. You can then double click the .deb file, hit install and enter your password. After that, it should install any missing packages. It's advised to have DKMS installed though, because if there is a kernel update, you don't need to manually run sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup, DKMS will do that for you when the kernel is installed.

Thanks

What is the Front Page?

In the mean time I had found this set of instructions that worked great:
http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-vi ... 10-desktop

I now have XP installed and will do the Guest Additions. Wish me luck. Thanks

You mean you got here without the use of the Front page? Front page is a default alias for the main website. In this case, www.virtualbox.org is the front page.

so far after 2 days using it I've had a few minor glitches, my biggest problem is that I always have to reset the VM when starting XP it will lock up but then resetting it works, it starts up fine.
the execution of dos apps is clearly much more slow in this mode...but so far all my dos/windows apps have run like a charm with one exception, the very first time I ran my dcraw/mogrify/exiftools combo in a dos shell it threw some weird error (see attached...if they've fixed that bug, in the forum).

2nd time and afterwards? works fine.

My biggest problem has been something I did while turning off all the xp crap that is on by default that confused either xp or the vm in the process and I lost explorer and couldn't get it back without resetting the vm. But now that I'm through with that, no problems of that sort.

one other thing, I didn't do anything tricky to install this.
I just downloaded the .deb file, right clicked on it, selected the package-manager option, let it do its thing, and it all worked fine.
I just had to find the xvmVB control tool and that's in the applications/system tools menu.
My system was completely up to date before this, though.

I am sure that you can read the readme files, run sudo -i etc and get it to work right but I didn't do that.

And my biggest problem by far was getting the xp installer to finish "installing devices". To do that I had to temporarily-disable the virtual network card.
After xp finished installing, I enabled the virtual 1G desktop card, downloaded the Intel 1G desktop card drivers, installed them in XP and away I went.

...literally right now it's working like a charm.

h, a couple of things.

one when copying files between the linux share and the xp desktop in the vm, the system (the Linux host) *really* gets bogged-down...I guess I need to tune it so that the vm doesn't run at such a high priority level. Or something.

[this is odd because the files are just getting moved from one place to another on the same drive. I guess that's what "virtual machine" means].

and I'm having to do that because of a matlab script error...this works fine if the files are on the desktop (in the vm's virtual disk) but it seems to have trouble if the files are on the host share.

Warning: Could not get change notification handle for remote E:\pics\dcnew.
This file server does not appear to support change notification.
This server appears to support UNIX-style directory timestamp updates.
Type 'help changeNotification' for more info.
> In fixnames at 75
In raw at 20
??? Index exceeds matrix dimensions.

Error in ==> fixnames at 97
datestr=dlist2(i).date([1:11]);

Error in ==> raw at 20
[dn nameend rawext]=fixnames(cname);

so I have to copy them off the host share onto the vm's virtual disk or else edit the script to handle this.

...and just like that I've filled up the 10GB that I allocated to the VM. XP, by the way, is taking over 3GB of space.

well I finally got the xvVirtualBox to barf....after copying about 20GB worth of raw image data back and forth between the Linux host and the xp guest, using a share on the linux host...it threw a couple of "delayed write error: the data is lost" errors. The files seem to be there, though, just there seems to be a lack of coordination between Linux and the xvvb software. Linux io in a terminal slowed *way* down...restarting XP gave me a 800x600 display...I shut that down and Linux healed itself.

luckily those were old raw files that I was just renaming, and using the file & date info...that's the only reason that I copied them off the share, my script software expected the date & time in dos format.

well it took a licking, 20GB of data is not something to sneeze at but still it's not a lot in 2009

yep, looks like one file got corrupted, writing back to the linux share from xp.
yep, one is hosed so badly that nothing will even open it to read the embedded jpeg, and the next one (xp threw errors on both of these) the last 1/4 of it is hosed.

I have one question though.

If I have set up XP on a virtual drive, and the drive reaches its limit, how can I resize the drive, to make it bigger?

If you have any ideas please let me know

Oh, here's some very good reading on this topic:

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... ive#p33945
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 427#p65427
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 9276#29276

enjoy

It would be wise to read the VirtualBox FAQ before asking questions. It's a FAQ what you're asking .

Sasquatch wrote:It would be wise to read the VirtualBox FAQ before asking questions. It's a FAQ what you're asking .

...since one good piece of advice deserves another, it would be a good idea to think before you post.

thanks