Running Moblin in Virtualbox
May 4th, 2009After my experiences with Google Android I decided to take Intels Moblin for a spin. Intel make it very easy to try Moblin out as they already provide a VMWare image on the main download page.
As it turns out using VMWare images in Virtualbox is a piece of cake as Virtualbox natively supports this format. Simply download the image from the website, then unpack the file (if you’re using Windows I highly recommend using 7-Zip, plus it’s GPL licensed) and save the vmdk file into your Virtualbox harddisks folder.
In Virtualbox you just use the vmdk file as as the new machines hard disk and off you go. I found Moblin booted very quickly and connected to the network without any problem. The desktop environment used is XFCE so you would expect good performance but in use I found it was extremely sluggish. Some mouse clicks took 20-30 seconds to register and I noted that the CPU used by Virtualbox hung at around 50% during this whole period. I suspect that this is a problem with Virtualbox and not Moblin but it’s hard to be sure.
Moblin is aimed mainly at the rapidly expanding netbook marked which Android may also be venturing into. It will be interesting to see what happens in the future in this field, especially with Windows 7 fighting over the same market (if Microsoft can maintain it’s profit margins that is).
May 21st, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I simply cannot find the VMWare image on the Moblin site… do have a direct link?
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:14 am
Hi Aaron,
since the beta release they no longer have a VMWare image available, you need to use the .img file and install from that.
cheers,
Bob
July 8th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
I downloaded Moblin img file and started it under VirtualBox 2.2.4 and get garbled image:
http://www.uploadgeek.com/image-A9A2_4A551E1D.jpg
Do you get the latest moblin image to boot properly under VirtualBox?
October 17th, 2009 at 5:26 am
Moblin seems to have problems with Virtualbox 3.0
Any idea why?
October 17th, 2009 at 8:42 am
I’m pretty sure it’s because Moblin is heavily optimised for the Atom processor found in notebooks, but I’m not 100% sure that’s the sole reason.
Bob
November 18th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I’ve tried the latest Moblin release (2.1) on VMware 6.5.3, and while it installs without any problem, it just don’t work after booting…
November 18th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
I’ve also tried Moblin 2.1 in Virtualbox but without success. As you say it installs fine but won’t boot. It just hangs at the Moblin splash screen.
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:33 am
Hi,
I’ve got it running under Virtualbox. just follow the instructions on this site http://yongkhun.blogspot.com/2009/11/booting-up-moblin.html with a few changes.
On booting use F1 not Alt+F1 to get to the grub options plus change the line from
/usr/sbin/moblin-dm to
/usr/bin/startx
On my install there is no such file as /usr/sbin/gdm.
December 20th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
For people who want to test Moblin without ATOM processor , there’s Ubuntu Moblin Remix 9.10 : http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-moblin-remix/releases/karmic/release/
It can run in Virtualbox but it’s stuck at 800×600 and i’ve successfully installed it on an Athlon64 monocore machine : work great.
In Virtualbox Moblin was sluggish … ( look like he don’t find my graphic card and switch back to VESA driver :? )
September 14th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
I came across your www and found here many interesting articles. I’m sure that i wil come back here soon !