John Hunt

Following several guides on setting up a bridge on my laptop between the wireless network interface and VirtualBox for direct networking was simply not working for me. Today after lots of head scratching I finally discovered why.

Turns out that the standard bridge utils are no good for most wireless cards, but there is a workaround.

Check out this guide, and read under the wireless section:
Bridged Networking with VirtualBox on Linux Hosts

What you can do is add those various commands to a little script file in /etc/network/if-up.d/ which will set up the ‘bridge’ upon starting networking.

Woohoo!

Looks like the guys over at Innotek have been busy, probably old news to most but I just realised they’ve released version 1.5 of Virtualbox last year.

Among a whole bunch of bug fixes and other improvements it seems they’ve added one cool feature that will make working with those windows only programs much easier - seamless window integration with your host OS (I think that’s linux only, but I might be wrong). I’ve not tried it out yet, but as far as I can tell you can have windows application windows displayed properly and running at full steam with all the rest of your windows - very much like running some kind of cool (sort of) hybrid OS!!! I thought it was exciting anyway.

To explain what I mean further, I found this rather strange video on youtube:

Once I get that new pc, I’ll give it a go!

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Update:
It works, but it goes very strange if you have ‘desktop effects’/compiz turned on. Which is annoying! Nevermind!!! I’m sure it’ll be sorted out fairly soon.