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.


Linking and byte-compiling packages for runtime python2.5...
pycentral: pycentral rtinstall: installed runtime python2.5 not found
pycentral rtinstall: installed runtime python2.5 not found
dpkg: error processing python2.5-minimal (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of python2.5:
python2.5 depends on python2.5-minimal (= 2.5-3); however:
Package python2.5-minimal is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing python2.5 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
python2.5-minimal
python2.5


Is your Etch install doing this? It was with me, really annoying. However, I found a solution (not a great one, but it works).

I got around the problem by forcing removal of python-central,
installing python2.5, then reinstalling python-central.

This seemed to work for me, although the remove did uninstall gnome (although easy to put back after). Thanks to Cameron (http://http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2006/11/msg00006.html.

Hope this helps!

Unfortunately, Ubuntu (Edgy and previous versions of Ubuntu) doesn’t seem to have a handy little script called mount.fuse which should come with the fuse-utils package.

This basically means it’s impossible to get Ubuntu to mount sshfs mounts upon startup (nicely), or using a nice and simple mount command like:

mount /my/sshfs/mount/point/

Anyway, personally, I find it really annoying. Yes, there are probably good reasons why they don’t include the script, but no I don’t care. Well, not until someone can tell me an easier/cleaner way of doing this.

First, you’ll need to:
sudo apt-get install sshfs
sudo apt-get install fuse-utils

Then, download mount.fuse (works with Edgy Eft Ubuntu, not sure about anything else!).. stick it in /sbin/ and then sudo chmod 777 /sbin/mount.fuse (or you could be more careful with those permissions).

You’ll want to add lines with this format to your /etc/fstab file:
sshfs#jrh@alf:/ /sshfs/alf fuse defaults,noauto,user 0 0

I’ve found there’s a lot of mount.fuse scripts out there, which expect the fstab lines to be in a different format..so it’s quite important to use the right mount.fuse with the right fstab formatting!

Finally, if this happens when trying to mount:

fusermount: mount failed: Operation not permitted

try this.. it’ll allow your normal user to run fusermount (as root iirc):
sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/fusermount

It continues to amaze me how few people actually use this method of mounting with sshfs…it just seemed to make sense to me! Please leave a comment if you have a problem with this so I can add more info if needs be.