At the May 6th meeting of Boise Linux Group, I demonstrated the LinuxMint 9 and UbuntuStudio 10.04 releases running in VirtualBox OSE running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. A few questions were asked and this blog post is the result.

One of the things I was trying to accomplish in my VirtualBox environment was USB support in a Windows XP virtual machine so I could use my iPOD touch with my "warrior" laptop. The bottom line here is that the Ubuntu repository OSE version of Virtual Box does not support USB. To get USB support, you have to install the PUEL (VirtualBox Personal Use and Evaluation Licensed) version, also known as the "Closed-source" version. The PUEL version includes USB support along with RDP and USB over RDP (which means you can use your local USB drive with a remote session running on another system). The PUEL version is free for personal and academic use.

There are three versions of VirtualBox that are available for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx:
1. Ubuntu OSE 3.1.6_OSE - This can be installed using Synaptic or with apt-get. There are several packages which you should install in order to have a full VirtualBox Environment. The package list is: virtualbox-ose, virtualbox-dkms, virtualbox-qt, virtualbox-ose-guest-utils (which will tag virtualbox-ose-guest-dkms and virtualbox-ose-guest-X11 packages), and virtualbox-ose-guest-additions (Solaris/Windows support). I used this build configuration to make and run the virtual machines demonstrated at the meeting. Worked well, no issues other than USB.
2. Sun VirtualBox 3.1.8 (http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.1.8/)
3. Sun VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 2 (http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.2.0_BETA2/)

I installed 3.2.0 Beta 2 on HP "trial" laptop where I had installed the OSE version and had built the images I used at the meeting. 3.2.0 Beta did provide the USB connection options but I could not get them to work with my Linux images and I did not have the WindowsXP image to work with here, so that went untested. For both the Sun VirtualBox versions, I had to a complete uninstall of all of the OSE components using "completely remove" check mark in Synaptic. After upgrading to 3.2.0 on the HP, both the Ubuntu Studio and LinuxMint 9 virtual machines started and worked properly other than not being able to connect to the USB drive, something I can't say about my installation of 3.1.8 on my production laptop, more on this below.

On my Acer "production laptop" I uninstalled Virtualbox-OSE and installed Sun VirtualBox 3.1.8: Here are the results of my experience:

I was able to configure my WindowXP virtual machine to work with my iPOD touch but not without a major hurdle in that with this version of Sun VirtualBox PUEL, iTunes9 would crash immediately on starting and I traced this down to iTunes9 compatibility with Sun VirtualBox PUEL. I uninstalled the 9.1.x version of iTunes9 and installed the 9.0.2 version which works fine with my iPOD. You will want to install guest additions for both Windows and Linux virtual machines in order to get the better screen resolutions (very nice) and other support features that installing the guest additions provides.

I don't leave my laptops on overnight and when I turned on the Acer, I fired up Sun VirtualBox and tried to start a virtual machine which failed. To fix the problem, I had to run /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup which rebuilds the kernel support for virtualbox, takes a few minutes. I have had to do that twice after restarting the computer. This has not happened on the HP laptop, which doesn't make sense, but the Acer does have a lot more packages and services running on it. After the last update, and a reboot, I have not had to run the vboxdrv setup again. But be aware of the possible issue.

And now for the really weird stuff: On the Acer and Sun VirtualBox 3.1.8, the UbuntuStudio virtual machine would not bring up the Ethernet interface for network connection even though the network icon on the status bar along the bottom of the virtual session showed that it was connected. Using the root user, a quick check showed no eth0 interface and I could not bring it up without investing a bit of time in it. This was not an issue on the 3.2.0 Beta version on the HP laptop. Restoring the original image would not resolve the issue. I reinstalled UbuntuStudio from scratch to VirtualBox and that resolved the problem which doesn't figure as both WindowsXP and LinuxMint9 VirtualBox sessions did not have this problem.

A note on installing the virtual box additions which you can access from the "Device" menu on the session Window where you must select as a CD/DVD Device "VBoxGuestAdditions.iso" and once your virtual machine recognizes the CD, you can run the autoinstall to add the GuestAddition to your virtual machine. There is one gotcha here, as with VMware and other virtual environments, you must have the current kernel headers for your version of Linux installed to the virtual machine. In my tests, LinuxMint9 did have them installed by default but UbuntuStudio did not. I installed the kernel-headers-generic using synaptic so that the guest additions would build successfully.

Conclusion, Sun VirtualBox 3.1.8 runs well on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and aside from a few issues that I have noted here, it is a robust free virtualization platform. As with any virtualization solution, you do need to have sufficient resources on your "host" machine such as at least a couple of gigabytes of RAM and a recent P4 or better CPU for speed, duo cores work fine. There is a 300+ page User Manual which you can download from Sun at the links shown above, which is recommended that you download and have on hand.

You may want to stop back and review this blog post as it will be updated as I work with VirtualBox more.