Submitted by “Have you ever wished you had another computer handy? Maybe you want to try a new operating system out. Maybe you want to test something experimental without potentially breaking your own system. Maybe you need to run some software that only runs in a different operating system. Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring comes with a range of virtualization options that can help.”
if I compare with the Ubuntu wiki (in french), there are a lot of missing explanations and I bet more than one user out of two will not be able to obtain a nicely working VirtualBox.
I think this article is an adverse publicity…
And this was the most complete explanation for a virtualization solution with Mandriva…Quite short.
I was worried it was too long. It goes through every stage in setting up vbox. I had a version which had more detail on xen but it felt too long that way. What did you think was missing?
You ask me what’s missing. Well, just have a look here (event if it-s in French) and I think you’ll understand why I would feel more confident with Ubuntu wiki explanations…
http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/virtualbox
Even in French, which makes it absolutely useless to 90%+ of the intended audience, it’s only longer and more detailed because it has to describe all the Ubuntu specific workarounds.
I don’t see much there that our article is missing. the nmi_watchdog thing I may add to the article since someone mentioned encountering it in the comments. Otherwise…there’s a long description of what VirtualBox is, which is great but I don’t think really needed, the installation instructions are necessarily longer because the package is obviously not in the official repos (the MDV one is), and it takes a different approach to describing the app itself, trying to give an overview of all functionality rather than simply walk you through getting it up and running. Which is a perfectly good approach, but I think ours is too: it walks you through getting it going, then directs you to the official documentation for further info.
edit: forgot to mention – it also discusses a lot of stuff which only works in the proprietary edition. Our package is the open source edition, obviously, as it’s in our open source repos.
Edited 2007-05-06 18:13
I found out the Virtualbox accidentally and I managed to install live openSuse 10.3a, winXP, vista and kubuntu without any documentation it just worked out of the box and later on many other machines so I don’t think it was “quite short explanation” I just wish I’d saw this article earlier
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Ps. drakvirt is a news to me and it would be great to have some article / tutorial how to setup and use it and so on.
Why didn’t Mandriva ship spring with 2.6.20 or 2.6.21 kernel? (no pun intended).
This thing called stability and maintenance and not introducing too many changes to the heart of the OS.
Brilliant move if you ask me.
stability you know this word?
if mandriva user want a newer kernel, mandriva provide some others
as the others said, stability reasons, we kept the basesystem (kernel, glibc, a few other bits) stable between 2007 and 2007 Spring. It’ll be updated with 2008. Again as someone else said, there is an alternative kernel available in /contrib – kernel-tmb – which is 2.6.20. It’s a volunteer-maintained kernel but is very well built, supported (by the maintainer) and widely used.
Ubuntu users can use a deb for feisty (VirtualBox 1.3.8) produced by Innotek. There are differences between the opensource version you have to compile and the binary one, which add, among others, better support for USB and shared directories.
Even with the binary version, I can tell you by experience that the average user asks lot of questions and feels a lot more confident when he can consult a detailed tutorial.
I do not pretend the french text is useful here, it’s just given as an exemple of a well enough supported application…
But I am sure MDV users are happy with what they get too.