just made the switch to ubuntu- installing stuff through the terminal

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rxteenager

Gawd
Joined
Apr 20, 2007
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Hey guys well after a long dependency on windows I wanted to give the linux world a try. I got ubuntu 8.4 installed, but I haven't been able to loose the windows dependency. I installed virtualbox through the add/remove section. but when I run it it tells me the kernel for virtualbox is not installed. I tried downloading it from the official website, but when i run the installer it gives me a "failed to install" message no matter what version i download. i know must stuff if installed through the console but honestly i haven't had any time to look around and research all the commands and how install it. If someone can give me a hand!

Well in unistalled the version i installed through the add/remove section and installed another one downloaded from internet. well i think i installed it sucessfully, but where the hell did it go? how the hell do i run it? i looked for it through the stuff i have installed but i can't find it anywhere!!
 
What you're probably seeing is that the driver is not loaded, which it is not set to do automatically. It can install by running the script with the command

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv start

You can download the program bum which manages your startup scripts and you can use that to set vboxdrv to run automatically at startup.


216
 
program bum! alright i'll look into it, i was able to get vbox configured and running :p, just had to unistall the ose version i had. Now as far as security wise, viruses, malware and stuff like that what type of precautions do i need to take on the virtual machine? Is running an anti-virus even necessary?
 
rxteenager said:
program bum! alright i'll look into it, i was able to get vbox configured and running :p, just had to unistall the ose version i had. Now as far as security wise, viruses, malware and stuff like that what type of precautions do i need to take on the virtual machine? Is running an anti-virus even necessary?
Click to expand...

You can still get viruses on a virtual machine. However you can also take snapshots of a VM, which makes going back if you break it very easy. Like save game for the entire OS's hdd.
 
Snapshots are for anything where you would like a stateful restore. So if you wanted to try out a new piece of software, if you wanted to reset to an initial install state, and in some cases wanted to fork a system. Just beware that if you have a highly utilized VM with a lot of data, each snapshot can be very consuming. The best way to handle this is to maintain your data on network shares from your host machine, if you have the VM configured correctly it should be as fast as memory can transport the data and thus as fast as your flat storage.

Unfortunately, we still can't really use a VM to test things like driver install success since all of the hardware is virtualized, that's the one thing I'd love to have a VM for.

Currently though I use VirtualBox to run my former system that I captured using VMware's free converter utility, and now I'm porting over all of my games (from WinXP to Wine on Ubuntu) while my fiance is using that older system. I have another stripped down WinXP installation running so I can use my system with Netflix's instant movie section. Virtualization is a beautiful thing.
 
Mistrblank said:
Unfortunately, we still can't really use a VM to test things like driver install success since all of the hardware is virtualized, that's the one thing I'd love to have a VM for.
Click to expand...

It will shortly be possible to do that. I use KVM for virtualization, and there has been a lot of recent activity on the LKML and KVM mailing list regarding Intel VT-d support. When Nehalem arrives, it will bring a real IOMMU (and thus direct hardware access) to virtual machines, and Linux will be ready :) I'm excited by the possibilities.
 
well that sucks kick ass... i just need to chip upgrade to take advantage of it all.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get wine to run properly but, thanks for all the tips.
 
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