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An Oracle branded VirtualBox Released - Oracle aren't going to kill this project
- rbanffy 16y agoHope not. I fear most for OpenSolaris. It's harder to fork than VirtualBox and far bigger.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoHow come? Our experience with OpenSolaris so far has been headache-y.
- rbanffy 16y agoI have some limited experience with OpenSolaris, but it has, so far, been good. I particularly love ZFS and its Linux-ish the package management. They could have the latest Gnome desktop for the adventurous ones.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoWe ended up using OpenSolaris for a project specifically for ZFS, plus some related hardware support. I typically use OpenBSD or Debian for most projects requiring a BSD or Linux, so I found myself comparing it to those two systems. We've definitely had some trouble with getting packages to work correctly, especially when using newer versions of software that were available as packages in the distribution. Most maddeningly though, it's slow. We set it up on a pretty beefy abmx machine, and at its worst it took over 15 minutes to boot.
- patrickgzill 16y agoThere is something very wrong with your setup. It should boot within +- 20% of the time taken by Linux on the same hardware.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoI know; we just haven't been able to puzzle out what's wrong with it. For now, we have to live with it. This was a while ago, but IIRC the slowdown was happening at a point in the boot process where logging wasn't helpful at all.
- j_baker 16y agoLast time I experimented with OpenSolaris, it seemed as though it was very useful for Java development, but not a whole lot else. It might have changed since then though.
- rbanffy 16y agoIt's a decent Unix OS. It's as comfy as any modern Linux distro. Much nicer than, say, AIX for a development desktop.
- nailer 16y agoWhat does it do better than Solaris 10, which seems about the equivalent of AIX or HPUX in terms of installation, package deployment, and toolset maintenance (as little as possible).
- rbanffy 16y agoA newer Gnome, mostly.
- chollida1 16y ago> Much nicer than, say, AIX for a development desktop. Interesting observation. In what way do you think Solaris is better for dev than AIX?
- rbanffy 16y agoGnome. Last time I used AIX, I used CDE. I assume I could install Gnome (I did it on an SGI, long ago) but I never got to.
- runevault 16y agoConsidering my primary dev environment for personal projects is an Ubuntu 10.04 VM running on Virtual Box, this is good news. Double bonus the new version has support for taking full advantage of i5 and i7 procs, and I'm running an i7 920. Time to upgrade when I get home tonight.
- Legion 16y agoI do it the other way around. Ubuntu is my primary OS environment, and VirtualBox lets me run those other OSs for various work-related things. It allows me to stay logged into Linux all day.
- random42 16y agoSame Here. My organization run backend on ubuntu machine, but as I am both a backend and frontend developer, I run Ubuntu as my base OS (for backend) and Win7 (for frontend), as Host OS on VirtualBox.
- kierank 16y agoVirtualbox is absolutely brilliant for reverse-engineering windows executables so I'm glad to hear this.
- vindice 16y agoThat sounds really interesting. I use VirtualBox all the time and have done a bit of reverse-engineering in the past. Could you elaborate on how VirtualBox helps with reverse-engineering windows executables please?
- ebiester 16y agoCan you point to a link for this, or briefly explain? Are you connecting vbox to a debugger?
- X-Istence 16y agoAre you using it strictly as a virtualisation host, or are you using the fact that you can set up serial ports and whatnot to do Windows kernel debugging? I personally use VMWare Fusion for reversing Windows executables, VMs are invaluable in that snapshotting aids in quickly returning to a known good state, and I can continue to take notes in applications outside of the VM to keep track of my progress.
- stcredzero 16y agoI suspect they've concluded that virtualization is a complement to databases.
- gaius 16y agoThey concluded that a long time ago - OracleVM. Looks like the strategy is OracleVM on the server and VirtualBox on the desktop.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- coverband 16y agoI love this thing but it goes through too frequent updates. They just had 3.1.8 9 days ago and now they have 3.2. It's not quiet about the updates either, so I feel bad if I don't upgrade. I wish updates had known release dates, except where security bugs are fixed.
- patrickk 16y agoWhile I'm glad to see Oracle are pushing the development of VirtualBox, I'm fearful they will make it 'not-free' and try to price it like VMware Workstation. I have the same fear for MYSQL. Let's hope Oracle have the sense not to tinker too much.
- jluxenberg 16y agoIt would be unfortunate if they decided to start charging for the free edition, however most of the product is GPLed. The only parts which are not open source are a machine-level RDP server, USB support, and USB over RDP (see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions). I'm sure the community would fork it if Oracle closed it up.
- drivebyacct 16y agoThey could always do a Wine thing or just have a commercial(ly supported) version.
- wingo 16y agoThe editorialization in the title is unnecessary.
- petercooper 16y agoThough if Oracle had actually put "Oracle aren't going to kill this project" on the page, my opinion of them would have gone up 1000 points.. :-)
- jluxenberg 16y agoThis release introduces MacOS guest support, but the license agreement for MacOS states that it must not be run on non-Apple hardware. From the VirtualBox manual: "Mac OS X verifies whether it is running on Apple hardware, ...these restrictions are not circumvented by VirtualBox and continue to apply." Wonder how long until someone patches the source to remove this check. A guest OS shouldn't be able to snoop and find out what kind of hardware the host OS is running on...smells like a hack.
- fleitz 16y agoIt doesn't find out what hardware it's running on. The stock kernel has a driver for the TPM module. When it doesn't find a TPM module the kernel panics. You have two options, emulate a TPM module with the correct keys, or replace the driver with one that gives the kernel the answer it wants. This is the basis for the "hackintosh" I'd hazard a guess that it would be pretty easy to get this going on VirtualBox using iBoot + Multibeast. http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/ http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/
- jws 16y agoJust from abounding laziness… If I'm running Linux on my Mac Mini, can I run Mac OS X in VirtualBox? The words say yes, but I rather doubt the executable says yes.
- johnthedebs 16y agoI'm really impressed with VirtualBox's pace of development. They keep coming out with big new features, passing the other major (paid-for) VM software in some ways. Hope this keeps up.
- codebaobab 16y agoThe Mac OS X support is cool and I would love to be able to run older OS X versions in a VM, but it looks like they've still got quite a bit of work before it is really usable. Issues include: "Even when idle, OS X guests currently burn 100% CPU. This is a power management issue that will be addressed in a future release." :( http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch14.html http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch14.html
- petercooper 16y agoAh, I was wondering why it was doing that! :-) Other than that, though, OS X under this version is pretty snappy given the circumstances.
- joubert 16y agoWhen I go Help | Check for Updates - nada. Will just have to go to their website and d/l.
- drivebyacct 16y agoMy VB has been Oracle branded for a while... oh wait, I was running a prerelease. Never mind me.
- drivebyacct 16y agoWhat if I'm running Ubuntu on a MBP. Can I run OS X as a VB guest?