Need help setting up and answers.

[stigmata]

Can the swap space on the host be accessed and used?
Can flash drives be accessed and used for/as/in memory (management)?
Is Virtual box based on Solaris Containers or FreeBSD jails or something else?
The virtual BIOS: Is there a way of creating a single key or simple key combination to access as a screen- such as on the host?

[Sasquatch]

Can the swap space on the host be accessed and used?

That is not advised, because if two Operating Systems use the same swap space, programs and even the whole OS could crash or even become corrupt.

Can flash drives be accessed and used for/as/in memory (management)?

AFAIK, only Vista ReadyBoost is able to do that.

Is Virtual box based on Solaris Containers or FreeBSD jails or something else?

Could you elaborate your question? What do you mean with "Solaris Containers" and "FreeBSD jails"? All I know is that it's written in C++.

The virtual BIOS: Is there a way of creating a single key or simple key combination to access as a screen- such as on the host?

That option is not implemented, and I doubt it will (although there are some requests for it). All the BIOS settings necessary can be accessed by the Guest settings, why would you want to edit it from a BIOS point of view?

[stigmata]

Could you elaborate your question? What do you mean with "Solaris Containers" and "Free BSD jails"? All I know is that it's written in C++.

Is the virtual design the same as those of the mentioned? System virtualization and not hardware virtualization? "user mode vs. xen"

That option is not implemented, and I doubt it will (although there are some requests for it). All the BIOS settings necessary can be accessed by the Guest settings, why would you want to edit it from a BIOS point of view?

I had a few instances of qemu (both with ans without kqemu) to over clock at a rate of 10% above the real cpu speed. Each one crashed. Can this be done with virtualbox or will it crash?

[Sasquatch]

Could you elaborate your question? What do you mean with "Solaris Containers" and "Free BSD jails"? All I know is that it's written in C++.

Is the virtual design the same as those of the mentioned? System virtualization and not hardware virtualization? "user mode vs. xen"

AFAIK, it's more based on Qemu. You can read about it on the wiki pages and I thought the manual, but not sure about that. Google and you will know too.

That option is not implemented, and I doubt it will (although there are some requests for it). All the BIOS settings necessary can be accessed by the Guest settings, why would you want to edit it from a BIOS point of view?

I had a few instances of qemu (both with ans without kqemu) to over clock at a rate of 10% above the real cpu speed. Each one crashed. Can this be done with virtualbox or will it crash?

VB passes the CPU to the VM at a chosen speed (shown in System Properties in Windows), but that is not always the correct speed, as I have found out on my laptop (but CPU scaling could have something to do with it). It basically gives you one full core of your CPU to use in the VM, though it will be slower than your Host would be capable of, but that's logical as it's virtualized and that's always slower.

[bundabrg]

Can the swap space on the host be accessed and used?

As Sasquatch mentioned, it would corrupt if the guest used the same raw device, but theres nothing stopping you for whatever reason creating a partition on the host as a swap space, NOT letting the host use it, and then using it via a VMDK raw file reference. I can't see any possible use for this to be honest.

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Is Virtual box based on Solaris Containers or FreeBSD jails or something else?

The jails/containers are simply really good 'chroots' that also jail process groups. That is, the programs run it in the context of the host, but are 'jailed' into their environment. VirtualBox runs a full (semi-)emulated machine environment. Its possible a jail will run faster, but you coulnd't for example run a different OS in a jail, and the jailed environement has to run with the same kernel and settings as the host.

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Can flash drives be accessed and used for/as/in memory (management)? 

I've personally don't really know what the hype is about in Vista Readyboost. ReadyDrive sounds interesting, but ReadyBoost sounds to me like a hack to work around Vistas bloatedness. Technically, having your host extend a swap partition on to the flash drive (assuming host is linux), and then running the guest with all the hosts memory + the swap space on the there _may_ approximate it... (IE, if your host has 1G of ram, is using 32Mb of it for itself, and you have your host have a swap partition on the usb drive of size 3G, you could give your guest a total of 4G... well 3.5G actually in 32bit world. Might run horribly, or it may work ok )

[stigmata]

I'm going to ask the question here.
Is there a command line for starting vbox?

[Sasquatch]

I'm going to ask the question here.
Is there a command line for starting vbox?

How would you else start VirtualBox? Check the /usr/bin folder and you will find the 'VirtualBox' command. It should be in the applications menu too though. But you can always create a launcher and the command should come automatically. At least, it does on Ubuntu.