Review: VirtualBox
Filed under: review
So it seems I am a slave to Apple’s software. I’ve had my glorious 30GB iPod (in arctic white, no less) coming close to two years. In that time, my library went from a humble six cd collection to over 3,000 mp3s. However, my former laptop (aka Della) was bricked pretty much, so I reformatted and installed Ubuntu on it. My new laptop is a shiny Dell with Ubuntu factory installed, which made my day! Needless to say, iTunes does not function in Linux. Well, at least not yet.
I’ve tried Rhythmbox, I’ve tried Exaile, but only one program really seemed to work: Amarok. Sadly, it still pales in comparison with iTunes, especially with the new Last.fm server change. See, not only do I want to be able to sync my iPod, I also want to “scrobble” everything I listen to. Amarok recently quit scrobbling tracks, and even the Last.fm Linux client ceased working. So, in essence this started off as a weekend project just so I could get iTunes working again.
Low and behold, Lifehacker to the rescue! On Friday, there was a post waiting for me via RSS. *Light bulb*, “Run Windows Apps Seamlessly Inside Linux” was exactly what the doctor ordered. This article was featuring VirtualBox, which I had never heard of until now. Of it’s many features, it includes a ’seamless’ mode (to be discussed later) so it will run both OSs simultaneously. I’m deathly afraid of doing dual-boots on my laptop, so this seemed a viable fix.
So off to InnoTek, the awesome folks who built VirtualBox (who is now owned by Sun Microsystems apparently), I went. Although I am fully capable of grabbing things from the repositories, I decided to go with a .deb file right on the download page, currently hosed at Sun. It seemed like they had a version for every distro out there. After a very easy install, and a reboot for safe measure, I began.
My music collection is fairly large, it takes up about 22GB of space on my hard drive. So, using the wizard to create a virtual HD image was fairly simple. I went with a 34GB virtual drive, so I could easily transfer songs and still have space to work with. The whole process in setting up the drive took literally took about three minutes with setting up the RAM and disc space. Once that was done, I attempted to turn this new “computer” on, but I got a file permission error. To fix this I did:
$ gksudo nautilus
Going to the file that was required, I edited permissions, logged out of my computer, logged back in and booted the virtual drive. I had previously put my Windows XP Professional into my disc drive, and using the Devices>Mount CD-ROM, I performed a speedy install.
About a half hour later, I rebooted the XP virtual drive, and installed the seamless feature. Then, I opened IE, and grabbed the Firefox 3 Beta 4, and installed that. After I set that up to be my default browser, I installed all my staple programs: AIM, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, iTunes, and the Last.fm client. Then I shut down the drive.
While still in VirtualBox, I set up a shared directory/folder. I wanted to drag things from my “home” folder to my desktop in xp. This in and of itself was an easy task, but after I set it up, I had no idea what to do next. In the article it explained that I had to run cmd in XP, and enter this command:
net use x: \\vboxsvr\’sharename’
The sharename would be whatever you so chose, so that was easy to change. Then I simply went to My Computer and went to the shared network drive, (which was the directory I just mounted) and dragged my entire music directory over to my iTunes folder.
Getting iTunes to actually work was a bear, due to mapping of the USB drives. I found this site linked on the Wikipedia article: Get USB devices mounted on your Virtualbox XP machine in Gutsy. So thanks to the nice people there, and following their well-defined instructions, I was able to get iTunes working.
Wait! Problem! Honestly, I don’t understand why this was happening, or even really how to fix it. I kept getting these horrible write error messages from our good friend Windows XP. Sadly, I didn’t get a screenshot of it, but roughly it said “Write Delay Error: File [insert iPod file here] not written due to a network or hardware malfunction. Please save this file elsewhere.” *Sigh* Oh no. What did I do to compensate for it? I spent roughly 13 hours doing nothing else than transferring little more than 50 songs, disconnecting, waiting for a reconnect, and transferring 50 more. Instead of running in the really nice ’seamless’ mode, I opted for the full-screen mode with as little background tasks running in Ubuntu as possible.
Aside from my horrific iPod/iTunes experience, everything else seems to work fine. Well, to clarify, Yahoo messenger doesn’t transfer files all the time, only when it wants to. Web-camming leaves something to be desired, as it occasionally freezes or all-together disconnects, and I know it’s not my internet connection. And this whole ’seamless’ thing? Well, in very plain words, it enables you to run [insert OS here] directly on top of your current OS, sans the pretty desktop picture. That’s about it. Oh yeah, and iTunes cover flow doesn’t work. :(
On another, much more cheerful note, SupraSphere is available for different OSs, so I grabbed the latest build for Windows, and decided to log in in both the Linux build and the Windows build. Here’s a little treat! :)
I have to say though, this instills in me more that I love Ubuntu Linux, more than Mac OSX, Microsoft products in general, and everything in between. It just runs smoother, and I earnestly hope that someone at Apple will read this and move iTunes over to Linux!
Andria’s Score: ★★★☆☆
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times showPosted on March 20th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
2 Comments
March 20th, 2008 at 11:15 am
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March 21st, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Suprablog HQ » Review: VirtualBox…
Good review of getting VirtualBox running on Ubuntu and the experience of trying to get iTunes running in “seamless mode”….