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Yesterday I had a problem with the shared folders when running 64bit Fedora 12 in Virtualbox. When I ran the command to mount the share

# mount -t vboxsf sharename mountpoint

it just returned the error ‘command not found’. It turns out the the command is actually a symlink called /sbin/mount.vboxsf that points to /usr/lib/VBoxGuestAdditions/mount.vboxsf.

My symlink was broken due to the fact that on 64bit systems the program is actuallly located in /usr/lib64/VBoxGuestAdditions/mount.vboxsf. To fix I simply deleted and recreated the symlink to point to the correct location.

# cd /sbin
# rm mount.vboxsf
# ln -s /usr/lib64/VBoxGuestAdditions/mount.vboxsf mount.vboxsf

It could just be me but I’m having lots of problem using Virtualbox 3 that was released on June 30th.

I already had Fedora 11 installed in a virtual machine but upon upgrading to Virtualbox 3 I could no longer boot then machine. It took about 5 attempts to reinstall fresh machine with various errors about my laptop not having the VT-x hardware virtualization support (not true), random freezes and some problem related to ext4 as shown here in this screenshot.

I’ve also tried to install Mandriva LinuxOne 2009.1. This seemed to install OK but upon rebooting it tried to check for updates and then just hung finally. After a hard reset it gave this error but at least all seems to OK now.

As I said I could just be unlucky but if this continues I’ll have to go back to an older version and wait until the problems are ironed out.

Since my last post I’ve downloaded the Moblin v2.0 beta img file and installed the img using Virtualbox. It’s easy to install, just use the img file as you would a regular iso file so set Virtualbox to boot from the img file.

The only gotcha is to remember to enable PAE/NX in the general settings, I seem to forget this every time but the boot process stops early on with the warning. I’m also not sure how much space is required for the install but at my first attempts failed with the partitioner complaining that you must have at least 2500 MB for the root (/) partition, I’d say to allow at least 4GB in total.

For anyone that’s used Fedora and the Anaconda installer before it’s all very familiar stuff except for a few removed options (no encrypted partitions for example). The install took about 10 minutes at most.

Once rebooted we arrive at the start page, or m_zone as moblin call it.

I’ll not go into much detail as it’s described thoroughly on the Phoronix site and Ars Technica but here’s a few screen shots of the applications screen, nautilus and a terminal (no it’s not hidden away!).

Many applications are standard Gnome versions but with a modified theme and I think the GUI is very easy to use even to some one totally new to the interface.

Just to note that there seems to be no GUI to shutdown Moblin, instead open a terminal and use:

sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now

The user you created on install is added to the sudoers file so you can run this command by using your normal users password.

Generally it runs OK in Virtualbox, if very slowly, plus there are some issues with the screen resolution as you can see in the screen shots that the top menu becomes ‘squashed’ at the right side and the start screen actually goes of the edge of the screen.

Nautilus

Applications Display

Terminal

After 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).

It’s been pretty up and down but I’ve successfully compiled Google Andriod for an eee701. The problem is that after converting the installer.img into a VDI file and booting in Virtualbox I’m stuck at the boot menu.

I’ve actually been compiling the source in a Virtual environment, a Fedora 10 virtual machine running on Windows XP Professional.

In brief here’s the procedure so far on Fedora 10.

1. Install the Sun Java SE Development Kit (JDK)
2. Edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the following lines.

   export JAVA_HOME='/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_12'
   PATH=.:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin:$PATH
   

3. Install gperf.

   # yum install gperf

4. Make sure you have a ~/bin directory in your home directory, and check to be sure that this bin directory is in your path:

   $ cd ~
   $ mkdir bin
   $ echo $PATH
   

5. Download the repo script and make sure it is executable:

   $ curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
   $ chmod a+x ~/bin/repo
   

6. Create an empty directory to hold your working files:

   $ mkdir mydroid
   $ cd mydroid
   

7. Get the cupcake branch

   $ repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git -b cupcake

8. To pull down files to your working directory from the repositories as specified in the default manifest, run

   $ repo sync

9. I tried compiling with

   $ TARGET_ARCH=x86 TARGET_PRODUCT=eee_701 DISABLE_DEXPREOPT=true make -j2 installer.img

   but this fails with the error:

   du: cannot access `out/target/product/eee_701/data': No such file or directory
   

   After making this data directory and running again the compiling is successful.

   File edit complete. Wrote 2 images.
   Done with bootable installer image -[ out/target/product/eee_701/installer.img ]
   

10. Change to the output directory

    $ cd out/target/product/eee_701/

11. Convert the installer.img to a Virtualbox VDI file

    $ VBoxManage  convertfromraw -static -format VDI ./installer.img  ./installer.vdi

12. Create a new virtual machine in Virtualbox and use this vdi as the hard drive.
13. Unfortunately this is where I get stuck. At first I received errors like:

    $  Booting `recovery`
    cmdline (hd0,1)/cmdline
    Error 15: File not found
    

    or

    Booting `std_boot`
    cmdline (hd0,2)/cmdline
    Error 22: No such partition
    

    Exactly as described here
    These problems were fixed by changing hd(0,2) to hd(0,0) but then it seems to boot only to be presented with this error. The same can be found in this post.

    init: Unable to open persistent property directory /data/property errno: 2
    sh: can’t access tty: Waiting for device /dev/block/sdb2
    

I can’t get past this error and the solutions on android-porting pages are sometimes hard to follow. Never the less I’ll keep trying especially that I’m so close.

Note that this was using the stock Andriod kernel. I also tried compiling the 2.6.27 kernel but it fails with the following error.

drivers/rtc/alarm.c:16:27: error: asm/mach/time.h: No such file or directory
drivers/rtc/alarm.c: In function ‘alarm_suspend’:
drivers/rtc/alarm.c:357: error: implicit declaration of function ‘save_time_delta’
make[2]: *** [drivers/rtc/alarm.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [drivers/rtc] Error 2
make: *** [drivers] Error 2

Reading this post I see that this is a known issue and there is a patch but I haven’t tried applying the patch yet.

If you do decide to compile your own kernel it’s pretty easy.

$ cd ~/mydroid/vendor/asus/eee_701/
$ make menuconfig

Save the config file then.

$ make bzImage

Then copy the kernel to vendor/asus/eee_701

$ cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage ../vendor/asus/eee_701/kernel

Is seems that the format for getting shared folders to work with Linux clients has changed. Assuming I’m trying to mount the Windows Desktop in the Linux client I used to use the following command.

# mount -t vboxsf \\vboxsvr\Desktop /mnt/desktop

I tried this today and it fails with the error:

# /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error

It turns out that the way to get this working is to drop the server name and use a lowercase ‘D’.

# mount -t vboxsf desktop /mnt/desktop

After reading this page about running Google Android in Virtualbox I thought it might be fun to have a go.

Just download the vdi file from the above site and create a new virtual machine. On booting I selected a video mode of 640x480x16 (use letter g) for best results. Note that you also have to enable the Serial Ports in Virtualbox otherwise it hangs at the grub menu. Apart from that it boots in a matter of seconds and looks really good.

Note that there’s no networking or mouse support right now but it’s still fun to play around with. Many thanks to the above site for sharing the vdi file for anyone to try.

It seems that only a few weeks go by and Virtualbox release a new version. I had only just installed Windows 7 Beta into Virtualbox 2.10 (using the Vista option) when they released version 2.12 with support for Windows 7. Admittedly the code base for Windows 7 and Vista are very similar but just the fact that they get a release out so fast is very encouraging.

It’s really a good sign when a large company like Sun can get changes out of the door this fast and I think it bodes well for the future development of Virtualbox. I look forward to what’s the next step for Virtualbox as it’s already a fantastic product.

Even though I’m a Linux enthusiast I still thought I’d have a look at the new Windows 7 Beta that was released to the public on Saturday.

I should also say that I’m very pleased that Microsoft decided to lift the 2.5 million limit on the number of license keys available but can’t help but think the whole situation was planned. It was obvious that after saying the only 2.5 million keys will be available there would be a huge rush that would cripple the site and get huge publicity.

Apart from the initial server overload it went very well downloading the beta, I got both the 32 and 64 bit files downloaded in about 30 minutes so they must have got something right in the end.

I installed the 32 Bit version into Virtualbox, no need to screw up a ‘real’ computer these days. The procedure is very simple but installing the guest Additions needs a slight tweak, the clearest instructions I’ve found are on the Sun Blogs site.

On installing there was a long delay between the ‘Windows is extracting files..’ message and the next stage, I actually thought it had silently crashed but just be patient as it does work in the end.

As for my impressions, yes it’s slick, looks very nice and runs extremely well in my virtual machine, but coming from a Linux point of view it’s boring. I’m sure the masses will love it but I just feel that with each advancement it puts me one step further away from knowing what my computer is doing.

I also wonder why the 32 Bit iso is 2.6GB (and the 64 Bit is 3.15GB) when there’s virtually no software included (although paint has the ribbon interface, woo hoo!). The Fedora 10 iso is 3.5GB but includes GIMP, OpenOffice, MySQL, Apache, Perl and thousands of other packages out of the box. Why Windows should be so large is a total mystery to me.

I also wonder about the small things, Windows 7 Beta still seems to have the same notepad that’s been around since Windows 1.0. Search Google and you find thousands of hits for notepad replacements (I use Notepad++) and yet Microsoft didn’t bother upgrading the one shipping with their flagship product, strange.

I’ve just tried VirtualBox 2.10 and their support for Fedora hosts has much improved. In the past I had problems running Fedora 10 in full screen mode due to Xorg 1.5 being shipped with Fedora 10. Now it works flawlessly along with the dynamic resizing and mouse capture support.

The main problem I still have is with seamless mode. When I tried this out I could only see a small patch of the client in a window in the middle of my host desktop so I was unable to even shutdown the machine.

I was running VirtualBox on a laptop with a P8600 2.4 GHz processor and 2GB or RAM, I allocated 768MB of RAM to the Fedora client and it actually runs much faster than natively on my old laptop with 512MB of RAM. In fact with it running full screen you would not know that it was not the host OS as it runs so well.

With many laptops now shipping with 4GB of RAM I can easily see the time when there’s no need to set up a dual boot environment but just use virtualisation instead. The main problem is with hardware support, for example accessing built in webcams and other laptop specific devices.

Update – I just tried seamless mode again and it worked perfectly so maybe the problem was an intermittent one, I hope so anyway.