| Misadventures in Sun’s VirtualBox with Ubuntu and Vista |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 04 August 2008 | |
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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. |
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