virtualbox.org

I run Win 2000 and I therefore can't find any version of VBox to install on my machine. So I made an Ubuntu guest via VMWare and tried to install VBox there, but it fails.

Details of the errors and steps I tried to fix it are here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5054763

Does anyone know if this is possible to do? Install VBox on a virtual Linux? It doesn't have to be Ubuntu--any distro (or even BSD) is fine with me.

Thanks.

All the mainstream VMs use JiT binary translation of the guest code to implement virtualisation. Very few use the hardware assistance offered by the latest 64-bit chips. BT usually perform better anyway with the current generation of chip architectures. You typically pay about a 5% performance hit for user mode code. This can be over 30% for executing typical Ring 0 code such as the OS and drivers. A VM environment is a pretty extreme type of Ring 0 case. I have seen examples both of MSVS and VMware where a guest is itself acting as a host to second guest. So these can work, BUT the second guest runs like a drain (I can't remember exactly how slow but it was something like 5x slower).

So my advice is if you need to run Ubuntu as a VM under Win2K then choose a virtualisation product which supports this probably. I think that you are stuck with VMware for this one.

Curious..did you actually try to run VirtualBox (XP version) on Windows 2000 yet?

Yes, I tried to install--the installer says that it won't work on less than XP and it won't install.

The issue is not running Ubuntu--I have that. I want to open a VirtualBox machine that someone gave me. I therefore must install VirtualBox on this PC, but it runs Win 2K. Qemo or whatever it is seems like the Windows port is dead, all I can find (for free) is VMWare to run a virtual Linux, but it doesn't (yet) seem to work...

It does seem to me that trying to run a VirtualBox VM inside a WMware VM inside W2K is a particularly masochistic approach to this. You will waste days on trying to get this to work, and even if you do then the guest+guest OS and applications will be pretty unusable.

Don't you have access to a native WinXP or Linux host PC? W2K isn't even supported by MS now.

TerryE wrote:It does seem to me that trying to run a VirtualBox VM inside a WMware VM inside W2K is a particularly masochistic approach to this.

LOL. I can not disagree actually.

TerryE wrote: You will waste days on trying to get this to work, and even if you do then the guest+guest OS and applications will be pretty unusable.

Don't you have access to a native WinXP or Linux host PC? W2K isn't even supported by MS now.

I will never upgrade--the other Windows are terrible. I hope to use Linux natively one day, but not yet. Anyway, yes I could install a native Ubuntu--I only wanted to extract some files from the VBox I got and it would have been easier to just run VB in my virtual Ubu, but if it can't be done, then OK.