[OSX-Users] Re: VirtualBox and ChromeOS

[Philip Boulain]

Hugh Glaser wrote:
> Also, any reports on actually using VirtualBox for other things?

I use VirtualBox, and find it great overall. It doesn't have quite all 
the bells and whistles of the others, but has the advantage of being 
free, and more importantly to me, seems to usually fail gracefully and 
show some evidence of being engineered by people who care---stuff like 
incompatable upgrades back up the old config and tell you what it's 
doing, and error handling and reporting is better than "Error: an error 
occurred, the program will now close".

The whole media manager thing is a bit weird---I'm guessing that's what 
tripped you up. Makes sense for hard drives, bit odd that they /insist/ 
that CD/floppy images go via media-library--type-thing.

Anyway, I use it to run Win2K for work (simple, aliased font rendering = 
nicer screenshots for printed documents), Win7RC for trying that out 
(and it's now a sacrificial install for all kinds of random Windows crap 
I want to try on a system that's doomed anyway, like AndLinux 
[terrible]), and Xubuntu for when I want a slightly less bad UNIX 
environment. ;)

Biggest problem is that Macs have no hardware # key, and the Alt-3 thing 
doesn't work under the VMs (they see it as just Alt-3). Pain for writing 
Perl, C preprocessor directives, and the like. Under Windows I think I 
have the US keymap and have to hit \ or something instead, and \ ends up 
on § on some other useless key. I'm guessing VMWare/Parallels probably 
have magic to work around this for Windows guests. (What does Boot Camp do?)

Oh, tip: change the network type from NAT to Bridged (you'll have to 
specify whether you want that to be to your wireless or wired 
connection) if you want VPN to work. I find VPN in a VM easier than 
trying to configure the host to only route via the VPN for internal sites.

And be careful of the snapshot feature; it's an example of how to 
misleadingly name UI operations---I always have to check which of 
revert/discard/discard (yes, twice) I want. I think it's the latter than 
means "merge this snapshot into the base state".

-- 
| Philip Boulain   PhD student |  <'')  |    "A game is a series of    |
| IAM, ECS, Uni of Southampton | ((  |) |     interesting choices."    |
| http://zepler.net/~lionsphil |  \/|/  |                 -- Sid Meier |