Calum's Wee GNOME Blog » virtualbox

Compiz in a Box

calum — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:32:31 +0000

In VirtualBox 2.2.0, which was released today, that is. The new OpenGL acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests allows compiz to run very nicely in a virtual machine. (Click the thumbnail for a Theora video of compiz running in an OpenSolaris guest in OS X.)

Compiz running in VirtualBox

EDIT: I suppose I ought to add there’s some other cool stuff in 2.2.0 as well, particularly the ability to import/export appliances in OVF format.

VirtualBox 2.1.0

calum — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:19:04 +0000

Sun released VirtualBox 2.1.0 today. In addition to bugfixes, new features include:

Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental; see user manual, chapter 1.6, 64-bit guests, page 16)
Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID; see user manual, chapter 1.2, Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V), page 10))
Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL (see user manual, chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), page 66)
Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (see user manual, chapter 5.1, Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA (AHCI), SCSI, page 70)
Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots (see user manual, chapter 5.2, Disk image ﬁles (VDI, VMDK, VHD), page 72)
New NAT engine with signiﬁcantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support (bugs #1046, #2438, #2223, #1247)
New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

Downloads for Solaris, OpenSolaris, Linux, OS X and Windows are available here.

VirtualBox 2.0

calum — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:29:58 +0000

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released today, and is available for download from virtualbox.org. New features include 64-bit guest support, host interface networking on Solaris and OS X hosts, support for nested paging on modern AMD CPUs, and a native front end for the OS X client (and a move to Qt 4 for the others).

More detailed changelog here.

OpenSolaris and VirtualBox

calum — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:08:32 +0000

Congrats to the VirtualBox team on being the first (that I know of) to provide a working Seamless/Unity/Coherence mode for OpenSolaris 2008.05 guests on OS X. (I don’t know how long this has actually worked, I only tried it last night, in VB 1.6…)

Obviously a bit of work to do before it rivals the sort of integration that Windows guests enjoy in Fusion and Parallels, but it’s a good step in the right direction…