Wow, we must have some pretty sharp M&A people. I’m no virtualization guru, but I thought that at least I knew about the serious players. But now we’re buying innotek, who make VirtualBox; I’d never heard of ’em but the reviews look good. I tried it out and learned a couple things.
First, there’s an OS X version which has a “Beta” label, but it downloads fast (only 21M!), installs easy, and is 100% Mac-flavored, seems to more or less Just Work.
The defaults are silly though; 128M of memory and 8G of disk. Neither Nexenta 1.0 nor the Indiana Developer Preview worked, nor did either provide useful error messages. Cranking the memory to 1024M and the disk to 20G got them both to install.
Nexenta couldn’t get out of console mode into X, but it seemed like a perfectly functional Unix system. Bug filed.
Indiana had Gnome running, felt perfectly snappy, but couldn’t see my Airport network. I filed the bug and there was a workaround posted this morning.
VirtualBox tickles my fancy: small, lightweight, works. Hmm... I wonder how the Orange Box games will run on my Mac?
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Martin (Feb 13 2008, at 10:24)
The cake is a lie! Portal is a great game.
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From: James (Feb 13 2008, at 12:31)
Does VirtualBox actually have Direct3D support? From what I could find it didn't yet.
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From: Bob Aman (Feb 13 2008, at 13:09)
"innotek" reminds me of Office Space's "Initech".
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From: Michael Norrish (Feb 13 2008, at 14:05)
Portal doesn't work on my macbook pro under Parallels, sadly.
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From: James Justin Harrell (Feb 13 2008, at 14:19)
The best part in my opinion is that it's open source (at least mostly). That reason is why I use it myself, instead of something like VMWare.
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From: Anon (Feb 13 2008, at 15:24)
Grr! Sun are gobbling up all the companies that make interesting Linux software! Soon there will be none left and the remaining Linux folks no sucked away to OSX will just have to give in and switch to Solaris because that will be where all the action is... : )
Anyway visualisation is only just starting to get on board with 3D. As it stands only the very newest and experimental virtualisation programs can virtualise a 3D card and I think there are still questions as to how fast that will be. This is one area that MS may eventually have the drop on other folks by allowing 3D cards to be "directly" virtualisable in DirectX 10.1 (or whatever the newest one is) which should help this side of things no end. All of that is a long way of saying "no it currently won't be fast or good enough for games that require a 3D card". I reckon your best bet there is to hope Transgaming's Cider gets it going or a native port happens...
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From: foresmac (Feb 14 2008, at 12:09)
Thanks for pointing me towards a virtualization solution I can finally afford!
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/02/14/virtualbox-move-over-parallels-and-fusion-its-sizzlean
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From: Wim Vander Schelden (Feb 20 2008, at 05:26)
VirtualBox doesn't have Direct3D yet. They're working on it, but it's not a priority at this time. Would be cool though...
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