For quite a while I have been having a recurring problem with sound on a Windows guest OS under Virtualbox. After a while it will just hang up and when I restart the Virtualbox session under Ubuntu I will get an error message saying that the host’s sound system isn’t working. Since I don’t use Virtualbox that often I forget about it and moved on.

I know it has something to do with the Pulseaudio system on my Ubuntu set up but was a bit lazy to google for a solution. Anyway my sound was quite fine under Ubuntu so I didn’t mind it at all.

Continue reading …

If you’re using Virtualbox, you can now update to a newer 2.1.4 version. Lots of fixes and improved stability (been using it for a couple of days and I observed less ooops on Windows XP guest under a Ubuntu host).

Here’s a list of what has been fixed or added on VirtualBox 2.1.4. Download Virtualbox.

Virtualbox 2.1.2 update is now available for download. My updates to Virtualbox are now easier and more automatic. I’ve added Virtualbox to my System’s Software sources so that apt will provide me a notice whenever a new version is available. You can setup apt for your Virtualbox software by following the directions at the Virtualbox web site.

After the download and update by apt, you’ll probably get a similar notice below.

You’d also need to recompile the kernel modules by issuing the following command on a terminal session:

1

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

After that my Virtualbox was working again. It’s mainly a maintenance release. There’s a pretty long list of fixes made in this version. You can find the list here.

Sun has released version 2.1 of its Virtualbox virtualization software. The version number doesn’t say it all ‘coz according to the changelog, there are actually some major changes to this latest release of the Virtualbox software. New features for this version include 3D acceleration via OpenGL and an new NAT engine that has significantly better performance. And ICMP echo or better known as ping is now supported.

I’ve downloaded Virtualbox version 2.1 on my Ubuntu notebook to update my current version 2.0.6. The update went out smoothly although I had to first uninstall the older version before installing the new version 2.1 of Virtualbox.

Continue reading …

The VirtualBox team has released version 2.0.6 of its VirtualBox virtualization software. I thought is was going to be something that adds support for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope but guess what, it’s something better!

For those of you who are using Ubuntu as the host OS and have installed VirtualBox to be able to use Nokia’s PC Suite, the changelog says “USB: Fixed support for iPhone and Nokia devices (Linux host: bugs #470 & #491)”. This is good news since a lot of Ubuntu users seem to be particularly interested in running the Nokia PC Suite under a VirtualBox guest machine running Windows.

Continue reading …

Version 2.0.4 update to Sun’s VirtualBox virtualization software has just been released. I’ve finished downloading the new version which is mainly a maintenance release.

Noticed one notable item in the changelog though — Linux additions: support Ubuntu 8.10. The update went smoothly without any problems.

Continue reading …

Last night before going to bed, I installed the recent kernel updates of Ubuntu. The update required a reboot so I decided to call it a day and shutdown my notebook instead of restarting and continue with what I was doing.

When I opened up my notebook (Compaq C793TU) today, the wifi and Virtualbox may have stopped working. Since a lot of people have been reading the following articles:

• How To: Install Ubuntu Linux on HP Compaq C700 notebook
• How To: Install Ubuntu Linux on HP Compaq C700 (Part 2)
• Upgraded to VirtualBox 2.0.2 on Ubuntu

I decided to post what I did to fix the problem in case some of you might need the information.

Continue reading …

I’ve just finished upgrading from VirtualBox 1.6.4 to VirtualBox 2.0.2 and I must say that the VirtualBox team has really done a great job in version 2.0.2. I still haven’t tried new support of VirtualBox for 64 bit guest machines because I am using the 32-bit version of Ubuntu.

One of the more obvious improvements that I readily found is in the seamless mode. Seamless mode in Virtualbox allows you to integrate you guest machine’s desktop into the host machines desktop. When I was using version 1.6.4, seamless mode was not too useful since my Windows guest machine would simply hang up.

Continue reading …

When I was about to start using Linux (Ubuntu) one of my concerns was being able to use the Nokia PC Suite since I own a Nokia mobile phone. So I tried to find a solution to my problem — the solution was to use Sun’s VirtualBox software to run the Nokia PC Suite since I couldn’t make it work under Winehq.

Continue reading …

I’ve read a lot about Windows taking up a CPU resources even when it’s idle but I never really got to experience it first hand or never bothered looking into it. I’ve been using my new Compaq Presario notebook installed with Ubuntu for several weeks now. After installing Ubuntu I suddenly realized that I still need the Nokia PC suite and it runs only on Windows (Nokia will you please port the Nokia PC Suite to Linux, thank you.)

So, what did I do? I had to install my Windows XP on a VirtualBox machine under Linux. After installing Sun’s VirtualBox virtualization software, I configured a virtual machine with enough resources (1GB of memory …) for my Windows XP. The installation went fine and I was able to install Nokia’s PC Suite successfully too.

Continue reading …