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Snowing again
Mar. 23rd, 2011 10:52 pmOr as an Anglo-Saxon might say, "Hit sniewe ut." Sort of freezing slush, actually. It hits the windshield wet and slushy, but freezes there until your defroster gets going good enough to keep it melting. For me, that's more than half way home before it clears up.
Five days of cold, like February, now. March, you got it wrong. You're supposed to come IN like the lion and go out like the lamb, not the other way around.
After some wrestling with VirtualBox (erstwhile Sun giveaway product that is no doubt about to be privatized by Oracle) I finally got it to boot from drive images that were originally installed in VMWare Server. The device drivers are the obstacle because the Windows XP image is already configured with drivers for the VMWare hardware emulation. The VBox emulation is different and needs different drivers. I was impressed when I learned that if you set it for Intel PRO/1000 NIC emulation you have to go get the real Intel drivers from Intel's website and install them. Sure enough, once you do that, it works. Intel's own drivers can't tell they are talking to fake hardware. That seems like quite a feat to me.
File and folder sharing between the guest and host operating systems is much simpler in VBox and seems to work just fine. They also let you mount .iso files to the emulated CDROM reader, rather than requiring a physical CD (though you can use one if you wish.) It all runs quite reasonably on my work machine, which is a fairly powerful CoreDuo. XP is a bit sluggish on the home desktop, but this machine is over six years old now and is "only" a single core P4 processor. It also has less RAM, which may be more significant. Anyway, it works, and I can now recover the data that was on that virtual disk drive without having to reinstall VMWare (a pretty messy task on Ubuntu, it seems.)
Gary and Red had their dog agility class tonight, so supper was delayed until 10:30. That's a bit too late for me. Glad tomorrow is only a half day.
Five days of cold, like February, now. March, you got it wrong. You're supposed to come IN like the lion and go out like the lamb, not the other way around.
After some wrestling with VirtualBox (erstwhile Sun giveaway product that is no doubt about to be privatized by Oracle) I finally got it to boot from drive images that were originally installed in VMWare Server. The device drivers are the obstacle because the Windows XP image is already configured with drivers for the VMWare hardware emulation. The VBox emulation is different and needs different drivers. I was impressed when I learned that if you set it for Intel PRO/1000 NIC emulation you have to go get the real Intel drivers from Intel's website and install them. Sure enough, once you do that, it works. Intel's own drivers can't tell they are talking to fake hardware. That seems like quite a feat to me.
File and folder sharing between the guest and host operating systems is much simpler in VBox and seems to work just fine. They also let you mount .iso files to the emulated CDROM reader, rather than requiring a physical CD (though you can use one if you wish.) It all runs quite reasonably on my work machine, which is a fairly powerful CoreDuo. XP is a bit sluggish on the home desktop, but this machine is over six years old now and is "only" a single core P4 processor. It also has less RAM, which may be more significant. Anyway, it works, and I can now recover the data that was on that virtual disk drive without having to reinstall VMWare (a pretty messy task on Ubuntu, it seems.)
Gary and Red had their dog agility class tonight, so supper was delayed until 10:30. That's a bit too late for me. Glad tomorrow is only a half day.
