A relatively unknown bit of virtualisation software called ‘virtualbox‘ from InnoTek has recently become open source’d. I’m actually quite surprised it hasn’t received more publicity. After hearing people rave about virtualbox in #hantslug on the blitzed irc network, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Setup was far easier and much more sane than vmware player/server, all configured via nice gui rather than weird perl script.

The best bit was yet to follow…the performance. Now, I’ve never used xen before, but compared to vmware, this thing flew. Honestly, I’ve never seen virtualisation so fast. Windows installed in no time at all on my Celeron 1.4ghz 768MB ram. Very impressive. So I thought I’d put it to the test. I loaded up a high def xvid video (960×528 w/5.1 sound).. it played flawlessly. This was stunning. I’d say it’s probably somewhere between 5-10% off native speed, and closer to the 5% than the 10%.

I’ve yet to comment on stability as I’ve not used it that long. The setup window did disappear once, but I think that may have been a one off.

There’s also USB support on the non-free binary, so it’s very close to having a native setup…virtually!

Try it now!!

Setting up VirtualBox on Ubuntu.

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Finally, a decent flash player for linux! Woohoo! I’m not sure whether it will be much of an improvement on the beta (that didn’t crash once for me), but all the same, it was about time a long time ago. Check it out:

Penguin SWF

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After wasting many hours messing around with VoIP solutions, I’ve finally decided that Tesco Internet Phone is the way to go. There’s a few good reasons why I think this, it’s easy for anyone to obtain and install. This was one of the main factors in my decision. With Tesco Internet phone, you don’t have to open ports on your router, it comes with a USB handset, so no need to get one of those, and you can just pop down to tesco and pick one up for really cheap (£15 I think) WITH a £5 calling credit thing.

Anyway, on to setting it up on linux. You’ll need to install kiax or some other IAX capable client. Unfortunately, Ekiga CVS still doesn’t support IAX (as far as I can see) so you’ll be stuck with a qt or kde client.

You’ll probably have to set up on a windows machine unfortunately, but basically, the main thing you’ll need to know is the Tesco IP server address, which is:
vrv.lon.uk.voicestream.net.au
Use your phone number as login and the password you set up. Then under Kiax’s settings you should be able to choose /dev/dsp1 to use the handset. There’s a few little quirks. The hash key doesn’t work, as don’t the volume controls, although there’s probably a way of getting these to work. More later!

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