An Oracle branded VirtualBox Released - Oracle aren't going to kill this project | Hacker News Reader

An Oracle branded VirtualBox Released - Oracle aren't going to kill this project

virtualbox.org

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This release introduces MacOS guest support, but the license agreement for MacOS states that it must not be run on non-Apple hardware. From the VirtualBox manual:

"Mac OS X verifies whether it is running on Apple hardware, ...these restrictions are not circumvented by VirtualBox and continue to apply."

Wonder how long until someone patches the source to remove this check. A guest OS shouldn't be able to snoop and find out what kind of hardware the host OS is running on...smells like a hack.

It doesn't find out what hardware it's running on. The stock kernel has a driver for the TPM module. When it doesn't find a TPM module the kernel panics. You have two options, emulate a TPM module with the correct keys, or replace the driver with one that gives the kernel the answer it wants.

This is the basis for the "hackintosh"

I'd hazard a guess that it would be pretty easy to get this going on VirtualBox using iBoot + Multibeast.

http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/

Just from abounding laziness… If I'm running Linux on my Mac Mini, can I run Mac OS X in VirtualBox? The words say yes, but I rather doubt the executable says yes.

Considering my primary dev environment for personal projects is an Ubuntu 10.04 VM running on Virtual Box, this is good news.

Double bonus the new version has support for taking full advantage of i5 and i7 procs, and I'm running an i7 920. Time to upgrade when I get home tonight.

I do it the other way around. Ubuntu is my primary OS environment, and VirtualBox lets me run those other OSs for various work-related things. It allows me to stay logged into Linux all day.

Same Here. My organization run backend on ubuntu machine, but as I am both a backend and frontend developer, I run Ubuntu as my base OS (for backend) and Win7 (for frontend), as Host OS on VirtualBox.

Virtualbox is absolutely brilliant for reverse-engineering windows executables so I'm glad to hear this.

That sounds really interesting. I use VirtualBox all the time and have done a bit of reverse-engineering in the past. Could you elaborate on how VirtualBox helps with reverse-engineering windows executables please?

Can you point to a link for this, or briefly explain? Are you connecting vbox to a debugger?

Are you using it strictly as a virtualisation host, or are you using the fact that you can set up serial ports and whatnot to do Windows kernel debugging?

I personally use VMWare Fusion for reversing Windows executables, VMs are invaluable in that snapshotting aids in quickly returning to a known good state, and I can continue to take notes in applications outside of the VM to keep track of my progress.

Both as a virtualisation host and I've dabbled in a bit of kernel debugging using it.

I suspect they've concluded that virtualization is a complement to databases.

They concluded that a long time ago - OracleVM. Looks like the strategy is OracleVM on the server and VirtualBox on the desktop.

I love this thing but it goes through too frequent updates. They just had 3.1.8 9 days ago and now they have 3.2. It's not quiet about the updates either, so I feel bad if I don't upgrade. I wish updates had known release dates, except where security bugs are fixed.

Hope not.

I fear most for OpenSolaris. It's harder to fork than VirtualBox and far bigger.

How come? Our experience with OpenSolaris so far has been headache-y.

I have some limited experience with OpenSolaris, but it has, so far, been good.

I particularly love ZFS and its Linux-ish the package management.

They could have the latest Gnome desktop for the adventurous ones.

We ended up using OpenSolaris for a project specifically for ZFS, plus some related hardware support. I typically use OpenBSD or Debian for most projects requiring a BSD or Linux, so I found myself comparing it to those two systems.

We've definitely had some trouble with getting packages to work correctly, especially when using newer versions of software that were available as packages in the distribution. Most maddeningly though, it's slow. We set it up on a pretty beefy abmx machine, and at its worst it took over 15 minutes to boot.

There is something very wrong with your setup. It should boot within +- 20% of the time taken by Linux on the same hardware.

I know; we just haven't been able to puzzle out what's wrong with it. For now, we have to live with it.

This was a while ago, but IIRC the slowdown was happening at a point in the boot process where logging wasn't helpful at all.

Last time I experimented with OpenSolaris, it seemed as though it was very useful for Java development, but not a whole lot else. It might have changed since then though.

It's a decent Unix OS. It's as comfy as any modern Linux distro.

Much nicer than, say, AIX for a development desktop.

What does it do better than Solaris 10, which seems about the equivalent of AIX or HPUX in terms of installation, package deployment, and toolset maintenance (as little as possible).

A newer Gnome, mostly.

> Much nicer than, say, AIX for a development desktop.

Interesting observation. In what way do you think Solaris is better for dev than AIX?

Gnome.

Last time I used AIX, I used CDE. I assume I could install Gnome (I did it on an SGI, long ago) but I never got to.

The Mac OS X support is cool and I would love to be able to run older OS X versions in a VM, but it looks like they've still got quite a bit of work before it is really usable. Issues include:

"Even when idle, OS X guests currently burn 100% CPU. This is a power management issue that will be addressed in a future release."

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch14.html

Ah, I was wondering why it was doing that! :-) Other than that, though, OS X under this version is pretty snappy given the circumstances.

While I'm glad to see Oracle are pushing the development of VirtualBox, I'm fearful they will make it 'not-free' and try to price it like VMware Workstation. I have the same fear for MYSQL. Let's hope Oracle have the sense not to tinker too much.

It would be unfortunate if they decided to start charging for the free edition, however most of the product is GPLed. The only parts which are not open source are a machine-level RDP server, USB support, and USB over RDP (see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions). I'm sure the community would fork it if Oracle closed it up.

They could always do a Wine thing or just have a commercial(ly supported) version.

I'm really impressed with VirtualBox's pace of development. They keep coming out with big new features, passing the other major (paid-for) VM software in some ways.

Hope this keeps up.

The editorialization in the title is unnecessary.

Though if Oracle had actually put "Oracle aren't going to kill this project" on the page, my opinion of them would have gone up 1000 points.. :-)

When I go Help | Check for Updates - nada. Will just have to go to their website and d/l.

My VB has been Oracle branded for a while... oh wait, I was running a prerelease. Never mind me.

What if I'm running Ubuntu on a MBP. Can I run OS X as a VB guest?

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