Liam on Linux

One commenter to my big post about VirtualBox the other day - an old mate from CIX, syllopsium - said that he found VBox's support for OSs other than Windows or Linux to be pretty poor.

So, I thought I'd try the only couple of ISOs I have of OSs that don't belong to either of those families: OpenSolaris (0609 build) and PC-BSD 7.1 (a distro of FreeBSD 7). Interesting both BSD & Solaris are on VBox's list of supported VM types, so I guess they ought to work. Certainly both booted happily from their ISO files, straight into functioning GUIs. OpenSolaris is a live desktop, so I was even able to get Web access from it.

I'm particularly amused by OpenSolaris. It took 2min to boot. On my old PC - an AthlonXP 2800+ with 2G of RAM, so old but not an antique - the same copy of OpenSolaris, burned to a CD, took about 20-25min to boot, and when it did, I had no working Ethernet ports so no working Internet access either. It's a great deal faster in a VM on this machine than on bare metal on the old ones. OK, so, access to a cached ISO file is quicker than a physical optical disk, but not that much faster on the other OSs I have tried. Linux Mint didn't install hugely quicker than on a physical machine - I doubt it was as little as half the time, more like ²/₃ of the time.

I must try both of these on the native hardware soon.

I'm discovering some limitations to the XP support, though. It is as one person in CIX:linux (slightly scornfully) described it: "a transparent-desktop job". XP windows do not intermingle with Linux windows; all XP windows form a single layer on the Linux desktop. Either they're all on top or none of them are. Also, in seamless mode, I can't move XP windows off the primary monitor onto my secondary screen - the seamless window is auto-sized to my primary monitor and that's all you get.

Neither of these is killer problems. One that is more awkward is that because GNOME sees the XP VM as a single task, although I have a Spotify window on my Linux desktop, I can't alt-tab to it or select it from the GNOME window selector (when that is actually working, which on a vertical panel is fairly seldom). I think that both VMware Fusion and Parallels on the Mac have solved this.

I still think it's pretty damn fantastic, all the same, mind...