https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like? It seems popular, osboxes.org seems to only have VMWare and Virtualbox image files. Apparently Qemu (and presumably KVM) support both those image types, is there any benefit of one over the other? My main aim at the moment is to get a Fedora VM going to see if they solved a bug I encountered in Debian/Unstable and if so copy their fix. One of the significant benefits of free software. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On 29/11/16 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
Yes, while I used to use VMware a few years ago I switched to VirtualBox and have used it happily for several years now, both for DOS and Windows XP images to run ancient software and for Debian and Ubuntu images to test things like ansible scripts. Cheers, Andrew
Virtualbox is good, but I dislike having to always recompile a kernel module every time a new kernel is released. Yes there is DKMS, but it's not as good as KVM. I use it to run Windows on my Ubuntu, and it is the best I've found for emulating Windows, with hotplugging of USB, shared folders etc. Why don't you just convert the VMDK/VDI they provide to qcow2/RAW, and import it into KVM, instead of using the other formats? http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/convert-images.html Sean On 29 November 2016 at 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main < luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
It seems popular, osboxes.org seems to only have VMWare and Virtualbox image files. Apparently Qemu (and presumably KVM) support both those image types, is there any benefit of one over the other?
My main aim at the moment is to get a Fedora VM going to see if they solved a bug I encountered in Debian/Unstable and if so copy their fix. One of the significant benefits of free software.
-- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
_______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main
On Tuesday, 29 November 2016 11:46:40 AM AEDT Sean Crosby via luv-main wrote:
Why don't you just convert the VMDK/VDI they provide to qcow2/RAW, and import it into KVM, instead of using the other formats?
Thanks for that reference. I had googled converting images but the results all seemed to say "attach it to a virtual machine" as the first step. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On 29/11/16 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
hi I use VB extensively and usually have at least one client open being an Ubuntu instance on a Fedora-23 system. It does have requirement to reinstall VB after a kernel upgrade, but on Fedora that is one command "dnf reinstall Virt...rpm" so it is not an impediment. I do use the rpms from the VirtualBox site and not those built by third parties "RPMFusion" which automates even this one extra command. It works well and great for running archaic systems, it will support back to MS-DOS-6.22 and MS-WIN-3.10. Fedora-17 (25 being the current release) is the oldest of my current instances. Otherwise do not run out or RAM, as swapping will stop a system. Steve
On 29/11/16 14:32, Steve Roylance via luv-main wrote:
On 29/11/16 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
hi
I use VB extensively and usually have at least one client open being an Ubuntu instance on a Fedora-23 system.
It does have requirement to reinstall VB after a kernel upgrade, but on Fedora that is one command "dnf reinstall Virt...rpm" so it is not an impediment. I do use the rpms from the VirtualBox site and not those built by third parties "RPMFusion" which automates even this one extra command.
Not sure about this reinstalling of VB - I have dkms installed, and the new kernel modules are built automatically as part of the kernel install. That's all I need to do. It can take a little extra time added to the kernel install, but that only happens once every three weeks or so :-) More of a pain is updating VirtualBox itself - you really do need the extension pack, but it needs to be explicitly installed. And then you need to boot up each of the VM's to run this update on their inside. I've turned off auto-updating for VBox just so it happens at _my_ convenience.
On Tuesday, 29 November 2016 2:32:08 PM AEDT Steve Roylance via luv-main wrote:
On 29/11/16 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
I use VB extensively and usually have at least one client open being an Ubuntu instance on a Fedora-23 system.
It does have requirement to reinstall VB after a kernel upgrade, but on Fedora that is one command "dnf reinstall Virt...rpm" so it is not an impediment. I do use the rpms from the VirtualBox site and not those built by third parties "RPMFusion" which automates even this one extra command.
As Allan noted DKMS is the ideal solution to that problem. But it's still a reason for me to avoid it. I currently have DKMS in place for zfsonlinux on some of my systems and don't want the added pain of multiple DKMS installations. I sometimes have a sudden and unexpected need to run a VM on a client's system and really want to avoid having to compile new kernel modules for that. NB this is more of an issue of personal preference and being conservative as a sysadmin than anything else, it is quite likely to just work well in practice.
It works well and great for running archaic systems, it will support back to MS-DOS-6.22 and MS-WIN-3.10. Fedora-17 (25 being the current release) is the oldest of my current instances.
Doesn't KVM/Qemu work with MS-DOS and MS-Win?
Otherwise do not run out or RAM, as swapping will stop a system.
Yes, one of the benefits of Xen in some situations is that RAM is reserved and outside the scope of the Dom0 OS. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 03:35:24PM +1100, russell@coker.com.au wrote:
As Allan noted DKMS is the ideal solution to that problem. But it's still a reason for me to avoid it. I currently have DKMS in place for zfsonlinux on some of my systems and don't want the added pain of multiple DKMS installations.
FYI, 'dkms mkbmdeb' now actually works to create a binary-only package. It didn't do anything that was actually useful for years, but that was fixed earlier this year. Unfortunately, it doesn't add a Provides: line, so you'll need to use equivs to satisfy dependencies. [ ... 5 mins later ... ] actually, it does now. the bug report I submitted about this has been closed, somebody submitted a patch back in October. I didn't get an email telling me though (BTS has always been a bit unreliable about email notifications in my experience) https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830670
Doesn't KVM/Qemu work with MS-DOS and MS-Win?
yep, it does. Virtualbox has better graphics support for the VM without messing around with PCI passthrough and installing a second GPU card, which generally only matters for games and other things that really need good, fast graphics rendering. I've used KVM with a few Win XP & Win 7 VMs. Works well enough. If I wanted to play windows games with KVM, I'd probably install another GPU. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
On 29/11/16 11:37, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
Has anyone used Virtualbox? What's it like?
I've used it mostly for Windows guests (2000, XP, 7, 10), for one or two programs I still need, and it has worked reasonably well. I started using it because the Linux machines I had back then didn't have VT extension support, which limited which virtualisation platforms could handle a non-Linux guest. I found the VirtualBox management GUI intuitive, but I only have a few VMs, I'm not sure how well it would scale for managing a bunch of guests. It also has a command line tool. They have a dual licensing system, where VirtualBox itself is GPL, but the extensions are under a closed licence. The extensions including things like USB support for the guest. It needs kernel modules built for it, but this process is all handled by the packaging system these days (at least in Debian), which has made it a lot less painful than it used to be. I did have issues running very old OSes (eg Win95), but that was more a problem with the guest kernels having a busy idle and there were workarounds. I've also had some instability with enabling the 2D graphics acceleration support (guest machines just exiting suddenly when running eg a game that used the acceleration support). Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65
Quoting Glenn McIntosh (neonsignal@meme.net.au):
They have a dual licensing system, where VirtualBox itself is GPL, but the extensions are under a closed licence. The extensions including things like USB support for the guest.
USB 2.0 support. (USB 1.1 is built into the GPLed core code.) -- Cheers, "It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking Rick Moen than think your way into a new way of acting." rick@linuxmafia.com -- Jerry Sternin McQ! (4x80)
participants (8)
-
Allan Duncan -
Andrew Pam -
Craig Sanders -
Glenn McIntosh -
Rick Moen -
Russell Coker -
Sean Crosby -
Steve Roylance