Virtual Windows on Linux

While looking for options to load my Garmin from Ubuntu, I came accross a link to Windows-7 Release Candidate. The activation looks to be good for about a year.

I have experience with both VMWare and VirtualBox hosting Linux on Windows (Android development). I've always wanted to give this a try the other way around (but wasn't eager for the cost of another Windows license).

A Windows-7 Customer Preview of the release candidate is available this month, so I gave it a try. The good news is it's to be active thru May of 2010.

I got VirtualBox 3.0.0 first for Ubuntu 9.04, following the instructions for adding it to the sources list. I added the source list, apt-get update and then searched for the virtualbox-3 version the site spoke of.

My Ubuntu installation is a 32 bit (even though my hardware is 64 bit), so I installed the 32-bit version of VirtualBox, as well as a 32 bit version of Windows-7. After installing VirtualBox, a reboot showed it in the Applications->System Tools menu.

Registration worked, I made a new Windows-7 "disk", allocating 1024M RAM to it, and then added the Windows-7 installation CD iso image to this "machine." I was now ready to "boot" this virtual instance. Windows installation worked fine. Next step was to reboot and update windows. On my setup (at least) the cursor-capture (right control) key doesn't seem to get passed back to VirtualBox once Windows-7 is running (it will before windows boot has completed, it seems), so a priority was to install the Virtual Box Guest additions from the Devices Menu. Installing this CD image showed it mounted on Windows (from the Start menu, Computer). I ran theVboxGuestAdditions-x86 version, rebooted Windows and now my mouse was no longer captive.

UPDATE: Note that for the VBoxGuestAdditions to correctly install on Windows-7, you need to boot Windows-7 in "safe" mode: press F8 at boot to get a menu giving you the option. Otherwise, Windows will not allow some of the files to be installed.

Browser, network, updates, sound, etc. all worked.

On Fedora-11 x86_64, again things are a little more complicated.

From www.virtualbox.org I installed the Fedora-11 64 bit version (an RPM file), and downloaded the 64 bit version of Windows-7 Preview (the release candidate). Reboot of Fedora-11, and VirtualBox appeared on my Applications->System Tools menu, but wouldn't boot (critical error). Firing it up from a shell (VirtualBox) showed a permissions problem on startup. On Fedora-11 the first userid is 500; on Ubuntu it's 1000. Since I have a dual-boot setup, and since I share the source (and document) areas, I changed my userid under Fedora. VirtualBox makes an IO directory, /tmp/.vbox - BUT incredibly it does not create it with the current invoking user's ID, but with (!) 500. Chown (with group = vboxuser) of this directory solved my startup problem (good). Unfortunately I'll have to do this each time I boot Fedora (it's tmp! I've reported this). Once running, installing Windows-7 preview worked fine; I followed the same procedures as for Ubuntu. On the Fedora Vbox, I could not get sound to work - whatever combination of vbox settings I used, Windows-7 did not see an audio device under the 64-bit setup & Fedora.

Other than that, browsing, windows update, playing videos (youtube, etc.), songs, all the fundamentals seem solid. On the 64 bit side, Adobe's Flash player didn't seem to be able to load automatically in Win-7 - I had to manually select a 64 bit windows (Vista) option for the browser install, and then it worked. Performance on both seems pretty darn good.

Another way to test web applications. I've built Google Chrome for Linux, but it's still in Alpha. Now I have Chrome, Firefix, Safari, IE8, and Opera running under windows.

As I fire these up, and try to make some links, I'm seeing the control key in VirtualBox 3 doesn't seem to come thru to the applications in the guest, e.g. CTRL-C / CTRL-V to copy / paste don't seem to work at all (I have to right-click COPY / right-click PASTE). Checking this with copy/paste attempt from within wordpad confirms; only the 'c' of a CTRL-c keypress makes it through; menu pasting pastes something from the paste buffer from before (outside windows).

Pidgin for online communications...

In my corporate environment, I had a couple of choices to cross over all the various messaging and internal, secure chat rooms, as well as outside connection for occaisional things like PyCon IRC meetings.

I used several things, eventually settling, because of breadth of coverage in one place, on pidgin.

Fedora-11 seems to keep up-to-date with pidgin releases (it just updated me this past weekend), but Ubuntu does not - so I followed the instructions for adding the repository, as shown on http://www.pidgin.im/download/ubuntu/

So far, so good - my Ubuntu now stays up-to-date with pidgin, albeit straight from the pidgin sources. If I have problems, I'll have to post bugs directly to pidgin.

nslookup?

For some reason, nslookup was not working on Fedora-11 today...

Some of the symlinks were illformed for the libraries.

$sudo yum reinstall bind-libs

seemed to solve the problem. The re-install was about 1/2 the size of the uninstall... not sure what was up.

Fedora Browsers

Blogger dot com complained of an error, post failing when I tried posting from IE6 under wine; apparently that post happened anyway.

As follow-up, when I tried to install IEs4Linux using it's gui, wine failed on rundll - wine complaining:


This is with wine 1.1.23 (from Fedora).

The first time through, the gui installer caused Gtk to complain - something about some code in a .c file that should never be reached... I could not get this to repeat, so it must be something about file creation / tests / etc.

I ran the installer with no-qui, and was able to get IE6 working. I tried making this post with it (and in fact had completed the post content) - but when trying to make the post, blogger encountered a submission error, and IE6 didn't keep a cache - turns out the submission happened anyway.

So, I went to FIrefox to redo the post - only to find it there.

Not sure how useful testing with this kind of IE will be - it looks like basic browsing and rendering are useful.

The beta IE7 install fails to reach anything; I've given up on it. For grins, I installed the IE5.5 (not sure what I'd want that for).

Perhaps I'll try this over on my ubuntu, where - if memory serves me - I have wine 1.1.24 running (and it's a 32 bit environment).

Browser News

Fedora-11 update today installed a Firefox 3.5-1

Neat stuff; some new things, among them custom buttons.

As part of custom buttons, I started looking through what's available (thinking I'd get a gmail button, for example).

One of the things I saw was IE6 for Linux. Interesting. Internet Explorer launched through something called IEs4Linux.

I searched - target audience: "Web designers who are on Linux"....

It seems to use a wine, configured so that it's a separate instance - so it doesn't mess up your registry on your "main" wine.

I tried installing it - it failed in gui mode (Gtk complained about code that should never be reached!). The installation from the command line seemed to have a problem when installing flash-9 (something about a rundll failing), but when I tried the browser, all seemed operational. I ran over to google.com (which tried to get me to install chrome - sorry, linux native version, thank you... more about that later). I went to www.web2py.com which now has flash-driven slides on the front page - and IE6 wanted me to install flash-player... ok, let's try, see if _this_ has a rundll failure... Nope; no problem; I'm watching flash content in my IE6 on linux.

This post is written from an IE6, running on wine 1.1.23 on Fedora-11.

Fancy that!
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Postscript - Apparently, despite blogger complaining, this did post from IE6