Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6 Released

Phew! After some enormously hectic weeks of coding, bug hunting, testing, we've released VirtualBox 1.6. It's a major update with several enhancements and fixes.

Here's the list of major goodies:

o Solaris and Mac OS X host support
o Seamless windowing for Linux and Solaris guests
o Guest Additions for Solaris
o A webservice API
o SATA hard disk (AHCI) controller
o Experimental Physical Address Extension (PAE) support

So, what're you waiting for... head over to the VirtualBox Downloads page and don't forget to read the User Manual. It's also been meticulously updated.

And one really good thing is that we're the first virtualizer of this kind to release SATA HDD support! Lots of work so far and lots more ahead, and an exciting future for VirtualBox.

Cool Blog Skin

One of the best looking skins I've seen in a while :) Extra points for being related to Haiku!



Very nice indeed.

Apple Safari for Windows Vista

I've always wanted to try out Mac products. Never used a Mac, an iPod, iPhone or whatever. Anyway, so I finally got a chance to try one for free :P I downloaded Safari for my Windows Vista and installed it. Installing was quick, no real hassles of reboots.

After hearing and reading so much about how cool a browser Safari is I should say that after trying it for a few minutes I already like it. Simply because its so lightweight and response compared to any other browser I've used including Opera. Strangely the memory usage footprint was unbelievable high. But I somehow never got the responsiveness from other browsers as I do with Safari. No wonder its raved by the iPhone users as well. Sleek and functional. Maybe because of my RAM but who doesn't have at least 2 gigs these days.

Another thing that I found strikingly pleasant was the Preferences (or lack thereof). No, I'm somehow who likes to customize an app in every possible way but the options shown to me where immediately the ones I wanted to see nothing more. No shitty stuff like Content Advisor, Parental controls, no overly complicated connection settings on the main tabs. In fact I'd say Firefox isn't half bad its IE's Options dialog that is filled with crap.

Rendering is also one of the main things associated with the Safari's engine. I found rendering of pages blazingly fast, standards compliant. Some pages seemed slightly off-the-mark but that's probably the custom IE-or-FF customized sites. Doing a quick check revealed the same on Opera so it's not Safari's problem.


The font rendering was also Mac-style aliasing. I'm a big fan of this rendering and even the highest font smoothing strength will not produce your usual Windows style "crispy" fonts. Frankly I didn't want this and I love the Mac-style rendering, but in case you want the usual Windows font smoothing Safari is capable of it but it is not available from the GUI. Included an obligatory screenshot of Safari running on Windows Vista.

Tip: Activate Windows font smoothing on Safari for Vista
Open the files: Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Safari\WebKitPreferences and Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences\com.apple.Safari and search for "FontSmoothing". Replace the value within the next "Integer" tag with 4 rather than 0-3. So using a font smoothing setting of 4 will produce your bad old Windows font rendering on Safari.

Happy browsing.

Non-interactive installation of Solaris packages

Performing non-interactive, unattended, hands off install of Solaris packages.

Installing Solaris Sys V packages involves user input. These inputs usually are choosing which package to install and confirming various security related questions such as running scripts (as root) and such.

Here's a simple way to install Solaris packages without user inputs or prompts. This means you can perform unattended installation of packages.

Create a simple text file, lets call it pkgresponse with the following content:

basedir=default
conflict=quit
partial=quit
idepend=quit
rdepend=quit
space=quit
action=nocheck
setuid=nocheck
runlevel=nocheck
instance=unique

This auto-response file can then be supplied to pkgadd to perform unattended installs. You can tweak the response file to suit your needs more. Like if you want to continue installation even upon partial failure of the package, change the "partial=quit" to "partial=nocheck".

The syntax for passing the response file during installation is:

#pkgadd -d ./mypackage.pkg -n -a ./pkgresponse [packagename]

The package name would be something like SUNWblah etc. This should perform a completely hands free install of the package. It works for most packages, if you find you need to add something more to the autoresponse do contact me about it.

Uninstalling Similarly to perform a hands free uninstall of the package do:

pkgrm -n -a ./pkgresponse [packagename]

VirtualBox on OpenSolaris

Just for historical reasons, here's the first ever screenshot of VirtualBox running on OpenSolaris when I first got VBoxBFE compiling on my system. What a moment :) It was 6th September 2007, after struggling with memobj which is hard enough even if I look at it now, and then implementing the timer it came to life! Now that it's been released I can brag/blog about it :P

And here is a subsequenty screenshot of the first VM I ran, Damn Small Linux of course. Since then VirtualBox for OpenSolaris has been improved quite a bit.

Currently we have host CD/DVD support, host interface networking (quite dodgy due to Crossbow being quite new and all), raw partition support along with the rest of the standard features available as an easy-to-install OpenSolaris package without any extra hassles. It's a simple matter of extracting a tar.gz and installing the package using "pkgadd" and just typing "VirtualBox" from a Terminal to run it!!

Cheers.

Oh and No that's not Linux, it's OpenSolaris. I don't like the default theme so I switched. And here is Sun engineer Joe Bonasera's post on it which includes a screenshot with the default OpenSolaris theme.

Sun and innotek

Shortly after we released VirtualBox for OpenSolaris hosts, after months of work, the very next day Sun announces it has acquired innotek.

Co-incidence? Not quite. Anyway, read all about the acquisition in these links:
Sun.com
Yahoo News
Sun engineer Steve Wilson's Blog Post
Heise.de (German)

OsNews has not picked up the news yet.

Read about our release of VirtualBox for OpenSolaris hosts here:
VirtualBox.org News Section

No we haven't yet included a screenshot but rest assured it works. I'll later upload a screenshot with OpenSolaris being booted inside OpenSolaris using VirtualBox later.

List of Ubuntus.. *buntu

Here are a list of *buntus I've come across...

Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Xubuntu
XUbuntu (this one is for X-Box http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/XUbuntu)
Edubuntu
Fluxbuntu
Mythbuntu
Scibuntu
Ebuntu
NUbuntu
Devubuntu
Elbuntu
Gobuntu

....