Mike Owens

Renaissance Hacker Extraordinaire (look at the ego on this one)

Filespanker LLC

April 17

VirtualBox

As a web programmer who runs Linux day-to-day, I use VirtualBox nearly every day for IE/Safari testing.

Years ago, I used VMWare, and from what I hear, it’s really polished under Linux these days. I haven’t tried it in a few years, but VirtualBox is awesome right out of the box.

Additional Points:

  • It’s actually packaged nicely, I click on a .deb in Firefox, and gdebi installed it in a few seconds.
  • The version that has all the features I need is open source.

However, they should GUI-ize the process of creating writethrough disks, which allow you to boot a VM from a real disk partition, now it requires a command line out of the manual. For those Googling, on Ubuntu 8.04, it looks like:

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /home/mike/.VirtualBox/winxp2.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1 -mbr MBR/winxp.mbr

Where:

  1. The Windows partition in question is /dev/sda1
  2. winxp.mbr was created with install-mbr —force winxp.mbr. It creates an virtual MBR that bypasses Grub, so I don’t do something stupid like start the WinXP VM then select “Ubuntu” at the grub menu. This is optional, but makes me feel better. install-mbr is in the package mbr.