VirtualBox is a virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. It is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).
I downloaded VirtualBox in my Ubuntu machine. I wanted to run my Windows box from within Ubuntu, for things that Ubuntu can’t handle. VirtualBox has distribution specific binaries available including Ubuntu Edgy Eft and Dapper Drake. I downloaded the Edgy specific package and installed it. The installation went fine.
Once installed, I found the menu entry under Applications -> System. It opened the VirtualBox. The first time you use it, you have to create a new virtual machine with the OS of your choice. I chose Windows XP SP2. I then set the virtual hard disk partition, amount of memory etc. Once that was done, I had to insert my Windows XP installation CD into my DVD drive. I had to then mount the CD/DVD drive. The problem was, VirtualBox is not showing my CD/DVD drive in the drop down box to mount (see picture). I’m stuck and I couldn’t continue since I couldn’t mount the drive. Any help would be appreciated. If there’s a better virtualization software available for Ubuntu to use (open source or free), please inform me.
This is the fix that worked for me. From the http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/775
“On Gutsy, please install the package libhal-dev (in addition to libhal1) when using VirtualBox 1.5.2. The reason is that VirtualBox tries to load libhal.so dynamically. This lib is only provided by libhal-dev. If this library is not found, VirtualBox will not use hal to enumerate CD/DVD devices. VirtualBox 1.5.4 will look for libhal.so.1 which is the correct link.”
sudo apt-get install libhal-dev
and BAM all my cd drives are enumerated by virtualbox…
You could always try to make an image of the disc you want, then load it.
I want to run Windows from my Ubuntu machine and there are few applications that I want to use. I’m not sure how far KVM will help me run Windows. The thread also says you should have a dual core system with hardware virtualization enabled. My desktop is not a dual core system.
KVM is an alternate that you could try: http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki
This post says that it works with edgy: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/gentoo-linux-help/82877-kvm-2-6-20-a.html
I have tried it on RHEL5 with ubuntu as guest and it worked for me.
Hope this helps