Misadventures in Sun’s VirtualBox with Ubuntu and Vista

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 04 August 2008 14:51

Technology

After reading good things about Sun’s VirtualBox, I decided to download version 1.6.2 two weeks ago to run Ubuntu 8.04 as a virtual machine within Windows Vista. While it worked perfectly at first, the installation of the virtual tools in Windows caused a complete system crash, which I could only fix by doing a System Restore. What happened, and now that VirtualBox has just had a maintenance upgrade to 1.6.4, will I try it again?

When Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” arrived on the scene, after being highly anticipated, I loaded it onto my system using the Wubi ‘easy installation under Windows’ tool, and I just had it in my head that it would allow me to run Ubuntu as a virtual session.

Now this was only a temporary misunderstanding, because as soon as I installed it I realised what Wubi did – it created a dual boot situation from within Windows in only a few clicks, letting me installing Ubuntu quickly and easily.

But running it from within Windows was not something Ubuntu did. Now, I naturally knew about VMWare, Parallels for Windows and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, but I’d also heard about Sun’s VirtualBox, so I decided to give it a go.

I downloaded the software, installed it, and proceeded to install my Ubuntu .iso file in an 8GB virtual file. Everything loaded properly, quite quickly, and soon enough, I was running Ubuntu in a virtual window under Vista, much like I’d been helping friends to get VMWare Fusion for Mac and XP or Vista running on their MacBooks.

At first I had a little trouble getting the VirtualBox tools to run properly on both the Linux and Windows sides of the equation, and I also had issues with getting VirtualBox to realise my screen was 1024x768, and not 800x600.

But I quickly figured it out, and had VirtualBox happily running as a full screen app, or windowed, as desired.

Performance was pretty good, too. I’m only running a Core Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM – it’s not even a Core 2 Duo. I’d allocated 512MB of memory to Ubuntu and it was all pretty good.

Then I realised I needed to install the VirtualBox tools in Windows as well, so I could have a mouse cursor that could travel between the virtual Ubuntu session and my Vista desktop without needing to press the right-CTRL key, which I had quickly become used to anyway.

This is where I had problems – after installing the tools, I needed to reboot my computer. This I did... only to find that Vista refused to load! It simply got stuck on a black screen with a white arrow.

What happened next?! Please read on to page 2.