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Creating Seamless Virtual Machine with Virtualbox 1.6

By Pavs on May 5th, 2008

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Hey, Did you Guys Try Jaunty Jackalope?

Virtualbox 1.6, which was released in May 2, was the first major release since Sun took
over virtualbox. All I can say is Wow!! This is perhaps the single biggest, most important New Poll: Vote For Your Favorite Desktop Environment
open source release which will change the face of how computers are used for years to
come. Hell this is even bigger than the release of hardy heron (IMO), and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
was a very important release. Acer Aspire One Review

One single feature of virtualbox, seamless, will make some major software completely
redundant in coming years. Don’t get me wrong, seamless was possible with virtualbox 6 Places to Buy Pre-installed Linux Computers
since the last release before 1.6; but it was buggy, not a part of the features and needed a
decent amount of hack and workaround to even get it to work. So seamless was possible,
but never like this. With virtualbox 1.6 seamless is truly effortless, and well integrated, and Be a Productive Linux User
super fast.

I think because of seamless virtual machine, the use of software like wine (compatibility Objectify: Overview
layer for running Windows programs on linux environment), Cygwin (Linux-like environment
for Windows), or a commercial product for a virtual machine like vmware, will be
redundant. For developer like me, who constantly have to switch back and forth between Open Virtual Machine Tools with Ubuntu Hardy
linux and windows environment, this is god-send.

For a list of new features, bug fixes, check out the official changelog:
5 Anti-Linux Sites You Must Follow!
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

So lets get going and see how to install and setup seamless virtual machine.
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Step 1: Setting up Virtual Machine

Download and install virtual box for windows over here.

Create a new virtual machine but clicking “New”:

What is Your Primary Desktop Environment?

Choose a name for the virtual machine, choose the distro you would like to install. For this

Generated by www.PDFonFly.com
example, I chose Ubuntu.
j GNOME
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j KDE
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j Xfce
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j Fluxbox
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j Openbox
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j Enlightenment
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j Others
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Vote

View Results

Next we have to select the base memory. Here I would like to say a few words. Virtual
machine are not for all systems, with the decreasing price of ever so powerful dual and
quad-core systems, it would be a good investment for you to truly experience the
integration of seamless virtual machine. Memory is also very important, I am showing this
example on a quad-core with 3Gb of memory.

I am using 1GB for my virtual machine.

Next we will create a virtual dynamic disk for the virtual machine:

The rest of the selection process is pretty straight forward:

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I choose 2GB because that all I need for this example, you can choose whatever amount
you like.

After creating virtual disk, it should give you summary and that should end the wizard.
Before you go on and start the virtual machine you have to assign the Ubuntu image file
you should have downloaded by now before instalation. Just mount your ISO image file to
the virtual machine cd drive:

(click for larger image)

Generated by www.PDFonFly.com
Go ahead start the virtual machine by clicking start on top of the menu. Now the OS
installation (Ubuntu here) should start. After you are done with installing the OS, go to the
next section to configure seamless feature.

Step 2: Setting up Seamless

Before you restart after installation, make sure you unmount the OS image file, the same
way you mounted it.

Now we will install “Guest additions” (Device –> Install Guest additions), which will add
many of the features needed to enable seamless and other features of the guest OS.

Double-click or run the file VboxLinuxAdditions.run as root, which will install guest
additions.

Restart guest ubuntu OS, go to Machine –> Seamless mode. Now you should have two OS
running side by side, with the ability to copy&paste any information, without having to press
“host” key to switch back and front from guest OS.

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This is how my Desktop looks like now, very cool stuff. :)

(click for larger image)

I hope you found this article usefull as much as I have enjoyed making it.

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d
appreciate it. :)

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Anonymous

May 5th, 2008 22:10

Yes a seamless VM could possibly be the end for compatibility layers that allow you
to run Linux programs in windows… but i think your completely wrong on it replace
wine, the vast majority of people running Linux do not want windows… so buying a
copy just to run in a virtual machine seems unlikely (unless its some mission critical
business software that doesn’t run in wine)

Ben

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