You can use a real, physical drive as a bootable hard disk in Sun Oracle VirtualBox using an undocumented feature, and it even works on Mac hosts!
Friday 12th March 2010
Monday 27th April 2009
FreeBSD 7.1 with Xfce, MS-DOS with XTreeGold and Windows 2000
In my quest to find the most useful virtualisation software for Mac I’ve so far used Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion and Q.app in various capacities. Today I decided to take a closer look at VirtualBox, the free and open source virtualisation software by Sun Microsystems.
Firstly the good news: VirtualBox is fast. Because it can take advantage of VT-x in the Intel processors of modern Macs the performance is in an entirely different league to QEMU based applications and much closer in performance to expensive (at least in the eyes of a university student!) commercial products from VMware and Parallels.
Because of it’s higher performance, VirtualBox can run all current flavours of BSD, Linux and Windows that I’ve thrown at it just beautifully. Creating machines is a snap, and the shortcut keys for commands such as hard reset (command-R) are the best of any Mac virtualisation product I’ve used.
Unfortunately for me there have been some problems. For starters, considering it’s a Sun product I found it disheartening to find OpenSolaris 08.11 can’t pass the initial boot stage to install without giving an error which is a shame. FreeBSD has difficulty using the emulated optical drive which in practical usage is fine but it means you need to initally install over a network, no easy install of an ISO is possible. And for my electronic nostalgia, VirtualBox crashes whenever I attempt to load either the EMM386 or UMBCPI upper memory managers in MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 2000 despite exhaustive attempts to map the correct memory addresses.
As I said on my Q.app review, my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro seems to be a very quirky machine for virtualisation: it seems to have troubles than most Apple people don’t seem to have! Keeping this in mind I’m ready to chalk these problems up to my eccentric machine, but it’s still a bit disheartening.
VirtualBox has the potential to be an amazing product, and certainly for Windows and Linux it does the job beautifully — especially for the price! Unfortunately for my own current needs though I’m going to have to give it a pass; while it does run Windows 2000 amazingly well I’d prefer not to have to use several higher end virtualisation products for different things.
Wednesday 22nd April 2009
Brown Bag PowerMenu running in a VirtualBox VM on my Mac
How much do you remember about DOS? Mr Nolte on Twitter sent me a link to an article of his on Examiner.com where you can test your DOS knowledge!
I scored 9 out of 10 (I fudged the very first question!) which given I was born in 1986 and used our first DOS machine when I was 4, I reckon is not too bad of an effort. I guess it’s true what they say, you learn more when you’re young than you do at any other point in your life.
These are the questions, if you think you know the answers go ahead to Harold’s article and choose the right multiple choice answers!
When was MS-DOS first introduced?
On which operating system was DOS directly based?
Which command is used to clear the screen?
What key(s) do you use to exit a program?
What does CTRL+ALT+DEL do?
What is the command ATTRIB used for?
What does FDISK do?
What would you type to see files and folders?
What is the beginning folder for all DOS paths?
Which program did not run in DOS?
I loved that old computer; we had PC-DOS 4.x I believe, followed by MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, then a few years later we got MS-DOS 6.22 to use with Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode (it was a 486SX!) so we could use the drive compression. We had Windows 95 on it briefly, but we really didn’t have enough RAM to use it properly.
As for DOS applications, before we had Windows we used XTreeGold (Wikipedia) as our de facto shell, then we relegated that to just file management when we got a shareware copy of PowerMenu by Brown Bag Software. I wonder if either of those or the companies that made them are still around? A cursory Google search turned up plenty of results for products called PowerMenu but none were the same. And of course it goes without saying that Commander Keen is the greatest game of all time!
Come to think of it… I could write a pile of posts about this stuff! Is "pile" the correct collective noun for "stuff"?
Tuesday 21st April 2009
Showing my support running OpenSolaris in VirtualBox on my Mac :-)
Well it’s official, Sun Microsystems found a suitor not in IBM, Apple or Microsoft, but with Oracle. I must say on the whole I’m cautiously relieved, though there are some things that worry me. What an ambiguous sentence. Well you know what they say, certainty is hobgoblin of the fool… right? Wait, that’s not how it goes.
Firstly, Java and Solaris absolutely make sense for Oracle; I believe I read somewhere that (paraphrasing) Larry Ellison claimed Solaris was the most effective Unix system out there for use with Oracle infrastructure. I haven’t played with OpenSolaris (or Linux for that matter) to the extent I’ve used FreeBSD but I was really impressed by it’s completeness and quality. I’m also interested in licencing; as a BSD guy the CDDL that has prevented Linux users from adopting ZFS and Dtrace hasn’t bothered me but Oracle’s work with Linux may see it change to the GPL… maybe.
What I’m also interested in is Sun’s free and open source acquisitions and assets, namely NetBeans, VirtualBox, OpenOffice.org and MySQL. If they keep them and continue to support them I don’t see any problem, and one could argue that said projects would benefit from being part of a larger company in the same vein as Linux at IBM. Some brainstorming on each:
NetBeans would compliment their Java acquisition, but Oracle is a signed member of the Eclipse foundation. Will Oracle attempt to merge it, ditch it or continue to develop it and instead ditch Eclipse?
VirtualBox at Oracle is a fascinating combination. Could Oracle somehow leverage VirtualBox’s virtualisation technology to more efficently deploy servers with Oracle’s database? They could do it with Solaris too!
OpenOffice.org is a real wildcard. One could potentially see Oracle leverage OOo against Microsoft, or perhaps they could pull a Novell and instead fork it into an independent stream and an Oracle branded product that could use groupware Oracle develops. The possibilities are extremely intriguing.
MySQL for me is a major concern. Oracle’s databases and MySQL are light years apart in features and from what I’ve heard scalability, but the gap is much narrower than it was even a few years ago. Is it conceivable Oracle would intentionally cripple MySQL or keep it with only a subset of features so as to not cannibalise their bread and butter? If they do, might we see MySQL forks or even a general move to PostgreSQL?
I’ve done work for Oracle in the past but I still don’t know the inner workings of the company or the details regarding merged product lines (ala PeopleSoft and Siebel). Whatever the outcome, I’ll be watching closely.
As I’ve said here before I have huge respect for Sun and have always wanted a pimped out Sun Workstation to really get stuck into Solaris. In fact if I were offered a Mac Pro or a similarly high end Sun Workstation I’d take the latter just because I’ve used them at university but ave never had one of my own before!
The biggest question I still have though is: what will happen to one of my top technology idols Jonathan Schwartz? Will he get a position in Oracle? Will he continue to blog from there? Or perhaps a more pertinent question would be: will he be allowed to blog from there?
I wish Sun the best in this transition period.
Tuesday 14th April 2009
My Applications folder is one full beast!
Since I first picked up my first copies of Connectix Virtual PC for my Blueberry iMac DV I’ve been awestruck by the elegance of virtual machines and have had a ridiculous amount of fun tinkering with operating systems and software I probably would not have otherwise been able to use. Some like FreeBSD have even "graduated" and become primary operating systems on machines I use, others like DOS and earlier versions of Windows get to stick around for bouts of electronic nostalgia.
Given I’ve been so busy with other projects and studying I thought the long Easter weekend would be a great time to look into some lesser known virtual machine programs for Mac: Q and VirtualBox. I’ll be posting my full reviews in the next day or so, but suffice to say they both fill their intended rolls amazingly well and could give the commercial Mac virtualisation solutions a run for their money. They’re free and open source, so you can download them and give them a shot right now!
For the sake of completeness, I talked about Parallels Desktop a lot back in 2006 when I was first messing around with FreeBSD on my then-new Intel MacBook Pro, then switched to VMware Fusion in 2007 because of it’s superior support for Unix-like clients. It’s kind of fun to look back at those posts for me, at the time I thought such experimentation was fun but essentially pointless; I had no idea how much I was actually learning.
If you love tinkering with obscure and/or old operating systems, it’s a great time to be alive! Now all I need is time…
