Ben Kevan’s Blog

I don’t think that VBox should be in the BuildService if usb support isn’t going to be provided because of licensing (or whatever) as it’s just going to be frustrating for people unaware that there are 2 versions available. I think that there should be a text file pointing to the version appropriate at the VirtualBox download page.

My experiences with 3.0 hasn’t been too good (compared to earlier releases) – attempting to use command.com froze my system twice and sound no longer works for in XP.

Other annoyances are that the add-ons are now compressed and must be unpacked and executed using the Windows command line (what a pain) and shared folders though easy to setup and use are very slow.

But for a free alternative it kicks butt and vmplayer can’t touch it’s functionality and vmserver is just to large a dl to bother with.

Running the official version on openSUSE 11.0, with Windows XP Pro as guest.

Very unstable. Crashes randomly every ten minutes or so.

First I thought it was the shared folders feature, so I disabled that. I’m accessing a USB flash key, which might also have something to do with it, since neither of those functions is reported to be all that stable.

Based on some Google research, this isn’t ready for prime time. And I agree that without the USB extensions, it’s not as valuable, which is why I downloaded the official version – which, sadly, is not stable.

Yes, same for me. VirutalBox is getting more and more unstable with each new release. I guess this has to do with all the new features that they’re adding. It should be more stable once all that got sorted out.

I’ve been running VB on OpenSuse 11.1 with no problems except I can’t get any sound from winxp. It works great but still trying to correct the one issue. Lucky for me I would only need sound about 15% of the time. The other 85% is just a desire to get sound working. VB looks promising though. I love the seamless feature.

I am not sure which is more complicated: VMWare’s go-to-market strategy, or the installation and management of their offerings.
I worked with VMWare products when it was owned by EMC Corporation. I loved the job that it tackled, but disliked the complicated way it worked, and the even more complicated way that EMC Corporation sold the software.
After migrating from inuux (finally landed on Fedora), I embraced VirtualBox – SUN did a great job of building the software, and really simplified the go to market strategy (I guess you can’t get much simpler than downloading the OSE via your package manager). I just don’t know how long VirtualBox will be free and downloadable (I have the same concerns about Fedora – I hope Larry Ellison sees lots of value – market share as well as profitability – from supporting Open Source software).
Setting up Virtualbox was a snap, and managing it is just as simple.
I have run into issues when transferring the VMs to other systesms – that could be a place where SUn can provide some added tools. Exporting and Importing VirtualBox machines from one system to another does not work smoothly. And transferring them is an awkwaed process, definitely not intuitive.
On my latest Fedora systems, I have installed Virtualbox to run an test Windows 7 system, and included such software as Skype and Outlook nope, Microsoft still won’t offer MS Office, IE and Outlook on any platform other than Windows and Mac).
Where I have found an issue with VirtualBox is access to USB ports (difficult to setup – no PnP; and although sound works fine on the VM, I run into a problem each time I work with Skype in the VM. Sometimes the sound out won’t work on the Virtualbox VM – I can hear the oother party, but cannot respond, or If I switch back to my main OS, I loses access to sound – it seems that Skype, especially, on the VM, locks the sound, and I have to close down the system and reboot (gee that sounds just like a Windows issue) in order to reconnect to my sound).
Other than that, the only thing lacking is a component to run Mac OS on a Virtualbox VM on Intel Linux or Windows).