virtualbox
Mint 9 and VirtualBox
If you intend to run Mint 9 inside VirtualBox on Windows, and if you are also willing to use the Guest Additions, I recommend that you use the latest VirtualBox version. On VirtualBox 3.1.2, I tried this and after I had installed the Guest Additions and rebooted the virtual machine, X wouldn’t come up because it couldn’t find any working configuration. I upgraded to the latest VirtualBox, reinstalled the newest Guest Additions inside the virtualized Mint, and everything runs just fine. Nice work again, Mint team! :)
I’m slightly disappointed by the VirtualBox “upgrade” process though. The installer would simply hang at the point where it configures the network interfaces – I had to first uninstall the old VirtualBox, reboot, then install the new version. This is not really (and never has been) an “update” or “upgrade”, it’s a complete reinstall. Being the lucky guy that I am, I could at least use the existing VMs without any problems after the “upgrade”. This needs to be improved, no matter what the company behind the product is called. >:)
VirtualBox > VMWare Server
I had some trouble upgrading from VMWare server 1.0.5 to 1.0.7 – I had to run the installer at least 3 times, rebooting even more often, in order to get the upgrade done. After that, I installed Mint 5 inside VMWare, and ran into the well-known troubles installing VMWare tools with a 2.6 kernel. I ended up being very frustrated. At that moment, a work mate recommended VirtualBox to me. I kicked VMWare off my machine (nice side effect: the speed of my internet connection roughly doubled after I uninstalled VMWare) and installed VirtualBox.
VirtualBox installs in almost no-time, and appears to be very fast and slim. It’s very easy to attach an ISO image as a virtual CD drive, so I chose this way to install a current stable Debian. I set virtual networking to NAT mode, which works “out of the box”: VirtualBox installs a network driver to the host system that maps packets to the “real” network connection of the host and vice versa.
Because the console video resolution was not too great inside VirtualBox, I added a port forwarding rule for host:2222 to guest:22 in order to ssh into the virtual machine using PuTTY. Doing this is really easy – you just need to execute the following commands (on Windows):
VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Guest" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/Protocol" TCP VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Guest" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/GuestPort" 22 VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Guest" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/HostPort" 2222
This example is taken directly from the VirtualBox help file. As soon as you have set those options, you need to switch off the virtual machine and then start it again.
At the moment, I’m very happy using VirtualBox – there is even a so-called “seamless mode”, which enables you to have X windows on your Windows desktop, behaving like “native” Windows windows. I haven’t tried this yet, but I will do so asap.
First impression: VirtualBox is very easy to maintain, it runs fast and stable, and it doesn’t modify as much of the host system as VMWare does. Hence, I prefer VirtualBox at the moment.