bobpeers -> blog

I decided to download and install Ubuntu 8.04 into a Virtualbox virtual machine last night and something funny occurred to me for the first time.

In the past with slow internet connections it would take many hours to download a 694 MB iso file (even at 2Mbps it would take 46 minutes) but with my 25Mbps connection it took about 4 1/2 minutes! Then I stared the installation, my laptop hard drive chugged away at 4200 rpm while the processor struggled to uncompress the iso. In all it took about 30 minutes to install, so actually downloading the iso file was about 7 times faster than the installation procedure! How times have changed.

Systems always have a bottleneck and any system can only process data at the rate of the weakest (slowest) link. Upgrading computers and networks always involves replacing one slow link with another. In my own network I’m in a constant process of up replacing each new bottleneck as it appears.

Right now I have 2 devices with gigabit network cards but both my laptop and router are limited to 100Mbps so everything runs at 100mbps. The next step is to replace the router with a gigabit wireless N version (maybe the D-Link DIR-655) and then replace the laptop.

If after installing a new kernel you may get an error message when you try to start Virtualbox saying something like ‘The vboxdrv kernel module was either not loaded…’. If you then read the logs the solution is actually written there.

Re-setup the kernel module by executing ‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’ as root.

Sure enough this command fixes the problem and rebuilds the kernel module for the currently running kernel.

# /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
Stopping VirtualBox kernel module          [  OK  ]
Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module       [  OK  ]
Starting VirtualBox kernel module          [  OK  ]

Using Virtualbox 1.6 you cannot install guest additions support when using a Fedora 9 guest. Yet another consequence of using leading edge distributions that have a release candidate of Xorg. Hopefully the next update of Virtualbox will rectify this situation.

Here’s the output when you try to install the guest additions:

# ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 1.6.0 Guest Additions for Linux
installation............................................................
........................................................................
.........................................
VirtualBox 1.6.0 Guest Additions installation
which: no dkms in (/usr/bin:/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin)
Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel module...
Building the shared folder support kernel module...
Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions...

Detected Xorg 1.5 RCx, refusing to install the Xorg modules. We will
provide
updated guest additions once Xorg 1.5.0 was released finally. Please
check
the vbox-users mailing list for further announcements.
Successfully installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions.
You must restart your guest system in order to complete the
installation.

I’ve still been dipping my toes in the world of Virtualization over the last couple of weeks first of all using innoteks Virtualbox and more recently giving VMWare Server a try.

From what I’ve read I expected VMWare to be far more polished (which it was) but I didn’t really find it any more usable than Virtualbox, in fact if anything I found Virtualbox a little faster.

The great thing has been just trying many different operating systems without any risk. I’ve always been a Gnome user but a few of the Linux distros I tried had pretty nice KDE desktops that I might consider using in future. I’ve always like the clean simplicity of Gnome and found KDE too messy, just looking into the KDE menus gives me a headache and the sheer amount of options that can be changed just leaves me confused. Sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

Having said that I see the KDE is a very powerful desktop and includes many apps not found in Gnome, plus in the 3.5 and 4.0 releases it seems much more user friendly.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at the speed of virtual machines even if they are only given 256MB of RAM. Mepis runs great, at least a fast as my native Fedora 8 install with twice the RAM.

Apart from needing more RAM in my laptop it’s made me realise that I also need a bigger hard disk, I replaced mine last year with an 80GB model but since it dual boots Windows XP Professional and Fedora 8 there’s not a massive amount of space left.

By the time you have a few virtual machines installed and have the ISO files lying around as well the space disappears rapidly. On a related not I must have downloaded 20GB of ISO files in the last few weeks trying out the different systems, it’s a good job my internet connection is fast and not capped (which seems a rarety these days).

I thing my next laptop will need at least 4GB of RAM and a 250GB disk to really do justice to Virtualization.

I’ve been wanting to try using virtual machines for quite a while now. I really want to use an Open Source application so I first thought of using the Kernel Based Virtual Machine but that requires virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V) which my 5 year old laptop doesn’t have.

After talking to a work colleague about innotek VirtualBox I thought I’d give it try.

Installing was a breeze using the Fedora 8 rpm provided and after skimming through the manual I tried installing Ubuntu 7.10. This was easy enough but the first thing I noticed was that I really need more RAM. I only have 512MB on my laptop an allocated 256MB to Ubuntu but it’s pretty sluggish and laggy to use. The other thing I didn’t realise is that to install Ubuntu you need to boot from the CD and then click on the Install icon on the desktop, otherwise it’s just like running a Live CD.

Next I thought I’d try Mint 4.0. I’ve read a few good things about this so decided to give it a run. Unfortunately the install crashed soon after booting (which is strange since it’s based on Ubuntu and that booted fine) so I’ll have to wait to see Mint in action.

Next up it’s Slackware 12.0 when I have the time, I’ll post my further impressions with Virtualbox as I progress but so far so good. My only complaint is that use of the Qt toolbox which looks decidedly ugly on Fedora 8.