VirtualBox 2.0 Update OK for Windows, Not So Good for Linux

Sun Microsystems announced the VirtualBox 2.0 update on September 4, 2008 (press release). VirtualBox is a free Open Source virtualization hypervisor that lets you run other Operating Systems (OSes) while still running OS X. I was especially interested in this announcement because it mentioned specific improvements for the Mac version: The software also offers a new user interface for the Mac platform, improved networking for the Mac OS X and Solaris OS, as well as improved performance, especially on AMD chips. I wrote about VirtualBox 1.6 just three months ago and was interested to see what changes 2.0 brought.

Sun's press release said VirtualBox 2.0 has a new interface for Mac OS X. If it does, it is not in the main menu or the Guest OS window. Both look exactly like the 1.6.x release UI to me. That said, there is nothing wrong with the look and feel of either window. So, I'm not bothered by whatever it is I'm missing seeing here.

The good news is that VirtualBox does not enter an error condition everytime I shutdown Windows 2000 Professional. One of the important uses of virtualization is to keep old platforms with applications that can't be ported to newer platforms. So, a stable relationship with ancient but important platforms like Windows 2000 is good to see. I ran into a small problem though. I noticed that the test Windows 2000 configuration I installed for my original VirtualBox 1.6 test was not at Service Pack 4. So, I used the VirtualBox 2.0 testing session to upgrade it to SP4. The required reboot resulted in the error message you see here. Fortunately, the workaround was simple: I stopped the virtual machine and rebooted it resulting in a clean boot the second time around.

Fedora 9 Linux looks less stable running under VirtualBox 2.0 than it did under 1.6.2. Fedora generates this kernel error message every time it boots inside VirtualBox. However, Fedora 9 seems to run without incident after dismissing this error message and continuing on to use it as usual.

The VirtualBox 2.0 Additions for Linux still do not work with Fedora 9. Or, specifically, the mouse integration piece does not work.

The VirtualBox Additions installation itself proceeds without incident.

VirtualBox sees the Additions installed in Fedora 9 and reports that mouse integration is available. However, what happens is that all mouse control is lost at this point. At this point I probably could have SSH-ed in and removed the VirtualBox Additions. However, it was easier to use TimeMachine to just restore the instance of Fedora 9 before I installed the Additions.

One improvement I noticed is that VirtualBox now allows Guest OSes to use the host network interface directly and become part of the local network rather than be forced behind a NAT (Network Address Translation). This makes it much easier to test server software using VirtualBox Guest OSes.

Overall, it looks like VirtualBox 2.0 may be a useful tool for virtualizing Microsoft Windows. However, I have some reservations about using it with Linux distrobutions. It should be noted that I only tested one release, though. So, your experience may be different using Ubuntu, Suse Linux, or some other Linux distro.