Markus Thielmann is a Berlin based open source enthusiast and developer. Read more...
VirtualBox 1.6.0 released
by Markus Thielmann on 2008-05-05
Sun finally released VirtualBox 1.6.0, the first major relase, since Sun acquired Innotek.
The most outstanding changes are:
+ support for Mac as host platform
+ support for Solaris as host platform
+ Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) is now officially supported
+ Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
- Sun obviously discontinued Debian and Ubuntu repositories (you won't find that in the release notes)
Since I was really keen to see the seamless mode in action, I installed a Debian Lenny (5.0) snapshot into VirtualBox.
I installed the VirtualBox Guest-Additions on both systems. It seems Debian Lenny has some problem loading the Virtualbox device drivers:
Fortunately, there's an easy workaround: Just switch to a terminal and start vboxadd by hand.
/etc/init.d/vboxadd start
/etc/init.d/gdm restartAfter starting Debian Lenny with the Guest-Additions, I tried the seamless mode. Unfortunately, Lenny's panels exactly cover Ubuntu's panels:
When testing seamless mode with Windows, this did not happen. The Windows task bar always stays above the bottom panel. I tried to attenuate this behavior by replacing Lenny's panels with one very small panel with an enclosed menu and application switcher.
While this basically works quite well, there's a huge drawback: You can't move or delete your desktop icons any longer while running a seamless guest system. At least for me, this is a serious showstopper. Without being able to organize my desktop, I don't need any "seamless" integration at all. In fact, "seamless" is quite exaggerated. Besides clipboard compatibility, there's no integration at all. You just don't see the background image of your guest system.
Besides that, VirtualBox is a nice alternative to VMWare's free server, although I wished Sun would partner up with Canonical and get the "non-Open Source Edition" VirtualBox into Ubuntu's partner repository. Or even better: Just release the rest of the code as open source.
Comments
I tried it but got serious problem with it, once the keyboard is captured it will get frozen, you cannot use it inside the guest OS or release it back to the host OS
I don't see the point in having a "seamless" Linux guest. Everything is displayed using X anyway, so you can "ssh -X guestComputer", and it will forward any new windows created from that terminal to your screen. Doing that will give you a truly seamless experience (minus sound) with most applications. There are a few exceptions, firefox may detect if its already running on your screen and re-use your local process. Since thats a basic feature of X you can do that with real remote computers too. Sometimes I'll configure things on my wife's computer without interrupting her, and when I'm done I'll just tell her the program is ready and configured.
Well, I only had Linux and Solaris for testing purposes but seamless integration doesn't stop here. So I find it valid to test it.
On the other hand, I find a (working) seamless integration much more intuitive than X-forwarding. I don't need to know which program to call and I don't need a terminal. While I'm using X-forwarding quite often, I do understand it's not a solution for every user.
I did:
/etc/init.d/vboxadd start
/etc/init.d/gdm restart
But after each restarting Lenny I had to did again, so I add line "/etc/init.d/vboxadd start" to /etc/rc.local and it's works.
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