Sun rev's "open source" desktop VM manager

Or is still an "enterprise" only feature that you have to buy the enterprise edition to get?

IIRC, USB worked out of the box for me. Or was that rhetorical?

In the versions of VirtualBox that I've tried, USB wasn't supported in the open source edition. Not sure if it is different in the new version.

Same old-- VirtualBox OSE does not support USB:

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions

Quoting: The VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is the one that has been released under the GPL and comes with complete source code. It is functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers....

Closed-source features... USB support

Though the full-meal deal is free-beer.

VirtualBox also doesn't do DirectX. The software installs, but doesn't initialize.

I very much like the style of VirtualBox, and think it has great potential if these two "inconveniences" are overcome.

Hey, if VB.OSE is really GPL, how about a fork that _does_ support USB? Shame I'm neither a programmer or a multi-millionare...

> IRC, USB worked out of the box for me. Or was that rhetorical?

Then you were undoubtedly using the "free" commercial version, not the open source edition.

Right. The Commercial version is "free" for personal and evaluation use.

I was wondering about a fork too. lol.

And yeah, some of the "primarily target enterprise customers" features (like USB) really don't strike me as features that only target enterprise....

I think my main complaint with vbox is that you can't simply boot up a livecd in it. You have to have a virtual machine defined with a hard disk as I recall. Which seems kinda pointless if you just want to boot an iso image.

So I generally use qemu for quick iso testing then resort to vbox if it doesn't work. hehe.

Kvm now works really well for boxes that have hardware virtualization (VT-x/AMD-v) with the basic setup really easy to get going. It has USB support (though I have not tested that so far), and the performance is really good. The graphics etc. are still not up to the mark but somehow its rate of progress gives the impression that it will get there quickly.

I've got to try KVM one of these days. Trouble is, my machine is a P4 without the new fangled hardware virtualization.

Quick question, does the KVM "virtualize" using one of a multi-core CPU, if I had a 4-core Phenom or something like that? I've been considering upgrading to a multi-core system if/when this Vaio laptop finally dies.

Quoting: Quick question, does the KVM "virtualize" using one of a multi-core CPU, if I had a 4-core Phenom or something like that?

Yes, it can make use of one or multiple cores. A basic invocation looks like: kvm -m [memory in MB] -hda [raw disk or disk image] -boot c Adding a "-smp 2" option, for instance, will make use of 2 cores out of 4.

P.S.: I have had issues with running cygwin (which is 32-bit) on an existing 64-bit windows installation using kvm on my work machine. Apart from that it has worked well for me.

@Bob:

Heres a link for the simple how-to I wrote, the install part is debian specific, the commands are generic once it's installed.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/545

Az, good news, your article says that kvm is in unstable, but the kvm package is in Lenny right now. It looks like qemu will work for me on this ancient relic of a processor.

(what an awful thing to say about a 2.8GHz system!)

My favorite part of the whole mess is using the overlays. It lets you do the installation once and then from that one installation have dozens of variants independent from one another.

Bob, Does kqemu work for you? I think you will need to install "kqemu-source" and "kqemu-common" followed by "module-assistant a-i kqemu-source". Then loading kqemu module, adding user to kqemu group as in azerthoth's article and passing "-kernel-kqemu" option to qemu should do the trick. It is reputed to have great performance but I haven't tried it so far.

Btw, for those looking for a GUI can check out redhat's "virt-manager" which is available in debian and ubuntu (handles qemu/kvm/xen).

Krisum, I'm still trying to get everything together. Two kids puts a damper on innovation!

**Edit: Ok, I've got it working just fine. However, being an old-school Networking type, I abhor vlans. So I'm going back to VirtualBox, if for no other reason than that the networking is automagic.

I am quite pleased with the simplicity of qemu and its setup (until I hit networking), so I can see very well how people would like it. It also seemed to run pretty quickly, although without networking I wasn't able to do much.