[clue-tech] A little sidux humor

[Peter Kuykendall]

>> And does VirtualBox really rock like that thread says it does?

 
>Most people on Sidux seem to swear by it, in the same fashion you
treat a standard utility. The free version of it has a few
limitations, such as usb, or it did the last time I tried it out.
There is also a for-hire version.
 
I've been fooling with the free version under Ubuntu Hardy for a few weeks now.  It's a hassle because the free version isn't in the Hardy distros yet.  VirtualBox OSE requires a new version of the kernel than what Hardy runs, and that version is not fully supported by Hardy yet.  One artifact is that it breaks sound support because it doesn't include the sound drivers and I don't feel like incurring the brain damage to track it all down and manually install it..  So for now I boot into 2.6.24-19 for most activity, then reboot into 2.6.24-20 w/o sound when experimenting with VirtualBox.

I have run a few VMs under VirtualBox, including Win2K and Win XP.  Both worked fine with no problems.  USB support is there.  

Note that USB support is broken in QEMU (the kernel changed, and Gutsy and Hardy use the new kernel that breaks QEMU).  There are finally some patches for QEMU but again I have no interest in incurring the brain damage to restore it back to before they "improved" (broke) things.  VMWare to the rescue LOL!  It still works.

I also found a live XP CD image on the web.  That was very handy for upgrading the BIOS on my Dell laptop, which of course has a Windows-only tool.  I was able to boot into XP live without mounting the hard drive, then run the Dell tool from a USB stick, then reboot back into Linux.  Total time in Windows: about 5 minutes.  Total brain damage: about 5 IQ points. :)

I was not able to run the Dell tool under Wine or a Windows virtual machine, which is what drove me to the live XP CD.

I assume that eventually Hardy will either support VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) (the free one) as part of the official distribution, or will support the -20 kernel with sound drivers (and whatever other drivers are missing that I have not discovered yet).

I've had enough problems with Hardy that I'm right on the edge of rolling back to Gutsy.  Maybe this will be the last straw.  Gutsy was pretty good but I upgraded to Hardy to gain the much better wireless and VPN support.  Unfortunately it seems that their quality control went badly off the rails with Hardy, so I would expect that their hands are full fixing broken stuff before they will be able to add support for new stuff such as VirtualBox OSE.

- Pete