Now that VirtualBox 2.0 is out with its 64 bit operating system support among other things, the version included in Ubuntu 8.04, OSE 1.56, is looking that bit older. Nevertheless, there remains a lot to like about the version that I have been using.

Windows XP running on VirtualBox OSE

For one thing, its shared folders functionality doesn’t trip up Photoshop Elements like VMware does. VMware so hobbled Photoshop’s ability to save back to the Linux file system that it had me looking at the WINE route and I got to using GIMP for a while. VirtualBox brought me back into the Photoshop fold and I seem to like the results that I can get with Elements better than those from GIMP.

Another nicety is the way that guest OS desktops can be resized to fit in a maximised VM window. For this to work, you need VirtualBox Guest Additions in place in the virtual machine but it works very well when all is in place; my experience is with Windows XP. Full screen is on tap too once you use the Host+F combination; the right hand control key is usually the Host key by default. If there is any criticism at all, it might be that seamless application windows are not available in OSE 1.5.6.

Linux kernel changes can upset things but drivers don’t take too long to appear and you can always take matters into your own hands anyway. It’s a far cry from the blithe indifference of VMware and the need to resort to vmware-any-any patching to get things under way again.

All in all, VirtualBox OSE treats me very well. Guest operating systems may seem sluggish at times but it’s never enough to annoy or seriously impede usage. It’ll be interesting to see if a newer version of VirtualBox makes it into Ubuntu 8.10.

It might be that GNOME contains a small trap awaiting the unwary: moving files for which you have no write permissions to the Wastebasket using Nautilus. This happened to me in Ubuntu 8.04 and I couldn’t clear the Wastebasket using the normal means. To resolve the situation, I thought of finding where the Wastebasket in the normal file system and that isn’t as easy as it might be. One place to look is ~/.Trash but I didn’t have that at all because the location in Hardy Heron is ~/.local/share/Trash/Files. Armed with this knowledge, I turned to the command line and performed the required erasure using sudo. It was all over very quickly once I knew where to look.

The Toshiba laptop that I acquired at the start of the year is a Windows Vista box and it isn’t something with which I want to play too roughly because the OS came pre-installed on it. I still want to continue to see how Vista goes at close quarters so removing it to put Ubuntu or some other Linux distribution on there wasn’t ever going to be an option that I was willing to take either. Neither was the option of setting up a dual booting arrangement using disk partitioning; I have plenty of experience of doing that to set up dual booting machines over the years and I don’t needed any more than what I already have. So, I was happy to leave it as a Windows box and only as a Windows box.

That situation has changed and the cause was Canonical’s decision to go for something novel when it brought out Ubuntu 8.04. The premise is as follows: a Windows style installation that popped an entry in the Windows boot menu that allowed you to fire up Ubuntu without ever having to do disk partitioning or other similar rough play. For those who are less than enamoured with the Linux option, it’s even easy to remove too, as easy any other Windows program in fact. Removal of Linux is very definitely not what I’d do and that’s even without the pain and upheaval of more more customary means for setting dual booting machines. In these days of virtualisation and hypervisor technology, I have my ideas as to what has been used to give us that easy way in.

Being an Ubuntu user anyway, the possibility of having Ubuntu on the laptop and the interesting opportunity that Wubi offered for getting it on there was too tempting for me to give it a miss. A small download from the Wubi website is all that is needed to set things off. You get a number of options up front like where to put the (large) file to be used to house the Ubuntu world and how large you might want it. Setting a user name and password for the thing gets included among other items. The next stage is to download the files to be used to perform the installation. Once that is completed and it took me a few goes to get the whole lot (thankfully, it stores things up to the point where the downloading operation cuts out so you didn’t start from scratch each time; even so, it’s still annoying and could put some off), it is time to restart the computer and boot into Ubuntu to complete the set up of the operating system itself; it is at this point that the familiar very much returns. A reboot later and you are into a world that does its level best to fool you into thinking that Windows is another universe and never existed on that machine at all.

So, a machine that seemed destined only ever run Windows can run Linux now as well. Wubi comes across as a neat and clever way to get a dual booting computer and I hope to leave mine as I now have it. No feathers were ruffled on the Windows side and I saw no sign of any destruction. That makes Ubuntu’s way of doing things a much better option than other distributions that make you go down more invasive routes when creating a dual booting PC. A question remains in my mind. Could this approach take off?

My experience is with Ubuntu on this one but I have found that you need to be careful as regards the file system used by the drive where you keep your virtual machines. If it is NTFS, VMware can fail to start a VM because it cannot create a virtual memory file while it presents as physical memory to a guest operating system. Use ext2 or ext3 and there should be no problem, even if that means formatting a drive to fulfill the need. That’s what I did and all was well thereafter.

Windows system error codes can be indecipherable so it’s useful to have a list. Microsoft has one on its MSDN website that may help. However, the decodes may not as explicit as I would like but they’re better than nothing when you don’t get anything other than the number.

I am very surprised at myself for not realising until recently that there is a way to make host data visible to a guest operating system installed in a VMware virtual machine other than resorting to using flash drives, CD’s, DVD’s and the like. You can copy and paste from the host into the VM but I have found that to be hit and miss at times. It was a revelation to find VMware’s Shared Folders function. I suspect that you need VMware Tools installed in the guest operating system to make it work and that may not be trivial for some Linux distributions or UNIX. I was using it with a Windows 2000 guest and a Windows XP host and it worked like a dream.

What you see below are the shared folder settings in the host’s VMware interface for that virtual machine. Just clicking on the Add… button brings up a wizard that will set up the shared folder for you; it’s all very user friendly. Look for the Edit virtual machine settings link on the VM configuration page, click that and pop over to the Options tab and this what you can get.

The end result of the above spot configuration appears in Windows Explorer like it does below. Not only are the shared folders accessible in this way but you can also map drive letters as if they were network resources, a very nice feature. It is definitely more accessible than working out Windows networking and getting things to happen that way.