Virtual Box

[KeiCar]

I'm giving my mom my old MacbookPro (1st gen intel, core duo not core2). Its not a fast machine but it does the job. Anyway, she is familiar with windows so I installed virtual box, which is a great FREE!!! windows emulator. Anyway, keeping things light (I have 2gb ram and that is MAXED out!) I downloaded and installed a "Lite" version of XP.

Here is the issue. The install went fine, but now there are 4 devices, well "virtual" devices that need drivers? How does that work with windows running in a virtual enviro...

They are: Base System Device (motherboard?!?, I don't know), Ethernet, Audio & Video controllers. The last 3 are obvious, the first one I think might be the north bridge chip? Not sure.

Anyway, how do you install a driver for a virtual piece of hardware?

[Egilbe]

I'm giving my mom my old MacbookPro (1st gen intel, core duo not core2). Its not a fast machine but it does the job. Anyway, she is familiar with windows so I installed virtual box, which is a great FREE!!! windows emulator. Anyway, keeping things light (I have 2gb ram and that is MAXED out!) I downloaded and installed a "Lite" version of XP.

Here is the issue. The install went fine, but now there are 4 devices, well "virtual" devices that need drivers? How does that work with windows running in a virtual enviro...

They are: Base System Device (motherboard?!?, I don't know), Ethernet, Audio & Video controllers. The last 3 are obvious, the first one I think might be the north bridge chip? Not sure.

Anyway, how do you install a driver for a virtual piece of hardware?

The host machine has control of the peripherals. Try running windows update from the virtual machine? Virtual Box is suppose to supply generic drivers so peripherals work. Maybe those devices are so old that Virtual Box doesn't have drivers for them...just thinking out loud.

[KeiCar]

I cheated and got a different version of XP lite and all is well.

Probably due to the fact that its a hacked apart version of XP, it confused virtual box and not everything was installed properly.

Thanks for your thinking

[Jader Pack]

Why not just install XP with Boot Camp? Does your mom also want to use the Mac aspect of the computer at the same time?

[morbs_gt]

Not trying to be "that guy", but I use VBox under linux to run linux, which doesn't make it a windows emulator .

Have you installed the extension pack on the guest OS? I've never used VBox on a Mac, does the fullscreen, mouse integration, file sharing, and usb device hotplugging work without it? I know for instance that there are some additional tweaks for the usb devices to work in ubuntu. Then again your never said if she would need any.

[BRealistic]

Saw this mentioned in some thread here and decided to play around with it.

Wow- this is a cool program.

I am running Windows 7 64 bit and Windows XP Home 32 bit at the same time.

[BRealistic]

Well, I never figured out how to get the shared folders to work... so I am using drop box to get files to and from the virtual computer.

[Jader Pack]

Well, I never figured out how to get the shared folders to work... so I am using drop box to get files to and from the virtual computer.

Shared folders work great for me. You choose the folder to share and they appear as a drive in "My computer" (assuming your guest OS is Windows). They're not appearing for you even though you've selected them? I wonder if you need to install the Virtualbox extension pack to do this?

[KeiCar]

Well, I never figured out how to get the shared folders to work... so I am using drop box to get files to and from the virtual computer.

I forget the specifics, but if its anything like how shared folders works with parallels, the guest OS would need a utility installed to allow the sharing. I forget, its been too long since I set this up, plus recently I've only been using it for Linux.

As far as I remember it always just worked...

[morbs_gt]

Installing the extension pack really adds more functionality than just the file sharing, but in the guest options, theres a place where you select the folders you'd like to share. Also, you can selectthe devices you want automaticalls "mounted" when starting the guest OS.

VBox was great when I was playing around with win2k3 server and workstations while studying for the microsoft certs. Its a better option than vmware when FREE become an important factor.

For the more advanced afidavits, the are ways to setup olives with vbox (juniper neworks content) to play around It doesn't give you all the features of the ctual hardware, but it's enough to get you started.

If you'd like to learn to play around with linux routers, it's also a great option to setup a linux guest, and install webmin to help you configure the router t first, and then you can dive into the more advanced ip tables settings.

[TurboZen]

I use virtual box to see if suspect software is a virus or not.