Go Virtual, Go VirtualBox, Go Freedom

The Mighty Brad recommended that I use VirtualBox to run an instance of Windows XP or Vista within my Ubuntu 8.10. And he was right… it was easy, it runs windows fast and it’s real zexy.

You can grab this nice little application from the add/remove applications feature.

Once you install it you can find it under “Applications > Accessories > VirtualBox OSE“. I personally moved it since it makes no sense to have it under accessories, but whatever, you’re your own person and can make trivial choices like this for yourself.

Launch the application and it looks very inviting and appealing. Click the giant-sized “New” button and you’re ready to ride the virtual-F-train.

Follow the wizard down the path to Windows freedom. As you progress it will ask for your windows media. Pop that crazy beyotch in your optical drive and watch the magic happen. When you’re done, it will add an entry into it’s list of available virtual OSes as shown below.

Note: During the wizard setup, it asks you if you want to set aside a permanent amount of space on a hard drive and where… or you can do the dynamic thing, whereas it essentially just grows the file as it needs it depending on what you are doing with the windows virtual machine. I went dynamic and it works fine with photoshop, illustrator, visio etc. I installed Windows XP Pro SP3. The dynamic thing won’t rob you of important storage space permanently, since hard drives are sooo expensive these days.

Now, start that baby up! and it should end up looking like the screenshot below. At this point I shouted “schweeeeet!” and gave my son a high-five.

Go ahead and setup the resolution to your desired size. And install whatever program you want as it shares your optical and usb drives automatically. It will also have network connectivity as well.

Mouse Focus Candy: This works schweet. Move your mouse into the virtualbox window and boom it’s automatically focused on the windows interface. Move the mouse out of the virtualbox window and it’s back to ubuntu. Very slick.

Sharing a Drive/Partition/Folder between the Ubuntu Master and the Windows Virtual Guest

Ok, to do this, and it took me awhile to get this working as apparently it’s an 8.10 thing… inside your Windows virtual guest do the following:

Open Internet Explorer and go to this URL to grab this file:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.4/VBoxGuestAdditions_2.0.4.iso
Grab Daemon Tools and install it.
Mount the image you downloaded above and install the Guest Additions software.
When done the install, reboot the Windows virtual guest.

Now, to setup which drive/partition/folder in the Ubuntu master that you would like to share with the Windows virtual guest do the following:

On the virtual box terminal window (across the top of your Windows guest session), go to “Devices > Shared Folders“.
Add in whatever shared folder you want. Make sure you mark it permanent.

Then in the Windows guest, go to the run command and type this info:
net use x: \\vboxsvr\ubuntupathname

Few Things on the above statement:
Make sure you leave a space between the “x:” and the “\\” or it won’t work.
And where I have “x:” that is the drive letter Windows will assign to the share, so choose whatever letter that pleases you.
And the “ubuntupathname” is the pathname that you saw when you setup the share in the “Devices > Shared Folders” section.

Sharing a Ubuntu drive/folder with a space in the name is an issue. For instance I tried to share “Data Disk” which is a separate drive I have, no go… because the windows command line won’t take the net use statement with spaces in the name… and no, quotations around the name doesn’t work.

In the end you should have a network share in Windows. You can freely copy files in and out of the drive from both the Ubuntu master and Windows guest.

I have install many big applications and everything works fine. And any game emulators you want to run in the windows guest work fine as well.

And that’s all she wrote! Cheers!