VirtualBox on Fedora 8
I managed to get my old Vista image created on Ubuntu Gutsy, to see if it would run under KVM on Fedora 8. Turns out I get a similar blue screen of death. Looks like it might be the splash screen of Windows causing KVM/QEMU to bork. Decided that it might be time to try VirtualBox.
No Fedora 8 RPMS are provided, so the Fedora 7 RPM will have to suffice. First snag? Lacking kernel-devel (by default, you now get kernel and kernel-headers). After installing that, its a simple sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup. Ensure that the user you’re running as, is also a member of the group vboxusers (you have to do this manually).
Starting up innotek VirtualBox is now a breeze. Though I have a feeling I have to run the setup everytime I get a new kernel (which is a problem in Fedora land, as there’s a rapid pace of development). This feeling was confirmed quite quickly, as I had a new kernel release almost immediately from the time I trialled this to the time I wrote this. At first glance, its an ugly application (Qt based).
Setting up a VM requires no KVM support, so in Fedora, this means removing kvm_intel and kvm from the running kernel. Good thing they’re modules, eh?
Setting up Window Vista was a breeze. Allocating it 1GB of RAM on my 2GB machine, seemed OK, as long as Firefox with multiple tabs weren’t running. Vista does something quirky – it pre-allocates all the RAM, probably by writing zeroes, and thus makes use of 1GB of RAM even before it starts. Oh well. At least I have Windows, and it performs, relatively well, so I can test software.
Networking? Much has been written about this, in fact, there’s even a ticket #504 for this. In fact, it was easy – Devices -> Install Guest Additions. Then get Windows to probe for new hardware, and add the network card. Very simple, quite unlike my KVM experience. If you for some reason want to mount the image itself, its located at /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso.
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