Joel Perry Productions

Well my first choice of Ubuntu’s JeOS is probably a lot more work than I want to go through, so I am preparing my backup plan.  Going to my favorite OS of choice, FreeBSD.  while looking up VMWare and linux hosts I came across a link that referenced FreeBSD, so I did a little more searching and now I want to list those links so I can find them later and hopefully get that to work when I get frustrated with JeOS (since I am not intending on using it as it’s creators intended, I am expecting it to fail, but want to try anyways as VMWare supports Ubuntu based OS as a Host OS and JeOS is a watered down Ubuntu Server, and overhead is a primary concern when dealing with Virtual Machines.  Maybe if I document well enough and it does work, my notes will get added to the VMWare and Ubuntu knowledgebases).

Anyways, FreeBSD links involving VMWare and/or just VMs

1. Although dated December 2004 for the first post, this VMWare forum post includes responses from VMWare employees regarding not supporting FreeBSD as a Host OS.  Also includes links to a site where a non-employee had been providing a FreeBSD port for VMWare, but stopped maintaining it after VMWare Workstation 3.5 last post in the thread was dated Jan 16th 2010, and still no official support. (fyi I am looking into this, as I just got assigned to a VMWare support team and so I am trying to get more familiar with their products.  I would like to run VMWare on the most secure, least overhead Host OS possible, and I am already somewhat familiar with FreeBSD)
2. instructions for enabling VMWare tools in *BSD guests
3. instructions on installing VMWare tools in FreeBSD 8.x guest
4. fantastic instructions on setting up FreeBSD 8 with KDE graphical environment, clear step by step install and post install instructions.  I will try them instead of doing Ubuntu’s JeOS as having this running even without VMWare would make me most happy.
5. the FreeBSD Handbook page for third party applications for installing, upgrading, and building from source
6. the FreeBSD Hanbook’s page on setting up VirtualBox in BSD
7. the FreeBSD official wiki-site for setting up VirtualBox

More from Finndo

• another no longer short post on Linux and VMWare
• Fedora 12, VirtualBox, and Shared folders – a How To
• couple of updates to the site…

ok, so I woke up and now can’t get back to sleep.  nothing new, but this time I decided to do something instead of just laying there hoping to fall asleep before the sun rises.  Now, I thought that I already had this working, but apparently not… —edit okay, so I need to note I was doing these steps while writing this post and when I got to the step to reboot Fedora, step 6, I fell asleep.

I was and am currently using, a Fedora 12 VM from my laptop, now I thought I had the shared folders from the host OS (Win XP) setup, but could not find the mount point, so I just attempted to re-mount it.  fyi I’m using VirtualBox 3.1.2  so I attempted to remount the shared folder to a simple location…

$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf’

so I do some Googling and come up with some interesting tidbits…

so, if you didn’t look at the link, here it is in a nutshell, to get the mount to work (yes I installed the VM additions, but did not notice the error…) please read the whole post before trying this, as there are some steps you may need to do a little differently and I have noted this, but not until after I list them!

ok, let me start from the beginning…

step by step instructions for getting shared folders to work in a Fedora 12 VM on VirtualBox (after you get fedora installed)

1. open a console window (I am a huge fan of Yakuake)
2. type “sudo yum install system-config-display”
3. give it your password (you may have to do this every time you type sudo)
4. type “sudo system-config-display”
5. this will open a window in your GUI (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, ICE, whatever) choose the options for your display (if using Yakuake you need to hit F12 to make the console window go away so you can see this new window)
6. type “sudo yum install gcc kernel kernel-devel kernel-headers”
7. restart the VM to boot with the newest kernel
8. goto the Devices menu and select install Guest additions
9. back to the console and type “sudo mount /cdrom /media”
10. type “sudo /media/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run”
11. (special note, if you have already run the VBox Additions from the cd, skip steps 7-10 and  just type this “sudo /etc/init.d/vboxadd setup”
12. now I do not remember if I had to create the share for My Documents in VirtualBox or if it was there by default, but I have one, called “documents” and that is the one I am using in this example. so, type the following “sudo mkdir /mnt/shared-docs”
13. type “mount -t vboxsf documents /mnt/shared-docs”
14. then you can now access your Windows XP My Documents folder from your Fedora 12 install in the /mnt/shared-docs folder!!!

Really not that hard, but nowhere in the documentation for VirtualBox does it tell you that you have to do all of that!

Now, you can type “su -” and give it your password, then you do not have to use “sudo” at all for the entire process.  you may ask why I do it then, and it is because I work on linux and unix systems for a living (or at least I am trying to) and for security reasons they tell you to never su to root (become the root user) as it is too easy to type an accidentally command in that will make the entire system irreversibly broken (with out restoring from a backup) and since I have been logged into some servers that are used in the monitoring/maintenance of the space shuttle and international space station, so making one of those stop working for several hours or more is a really bad idea! therefore you sudo every command you need to run as root instead of becoming root, gets annoying at times, but almost eliminates the chance of accidental termination of your employment!

Ok, so a note, I am running this Fedora 12 VM on a single core laptop with 2GB of Ram (1.5GB given to Fedora, and nothing running in the host except the VM) and when I ran step 5, it practically halted my system and took almost 30 minutes (part of the reason why I fell asleep) it would say it was downloading a 8.6 meg file and take 14 minutes to do so, at 858Mb/s (which is impossible I know, but that is what it did and said) anyway, the main reason I did this, is that I had downloaded some other Fedora .iso files and filled my Virtual HDD and needed to get them off!!

So, now you know… and as we all know… Knowing is half the battle!

[finndo@fedora12KDE yum.repos.d]$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf[finndo@fedora12KDE yum.repos.d]$ sudo mount -t vboxsf documents /home/finndo/Documents/local

mount: unknown filesystem type ‘vboxsf’

More from Finndo

• FreeBSD and VMWare
• couple of updates to the site…
• Some site changes

not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again).  couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com ) (another note, all links on my site “SHOULD” open in new windows, for some reason they never implemented “open link in a new tab” feature to HTML, or I just haven’t found it yet)

VirtualBox 3.1 - has been released with it’s new “big” feature… “teleport”.  some people might recognize this as being extremely similar to IBM’s Power System’s Live Partition Mobility.  in a nutshell this means:

Partition mobility provides the ability to move a logical partition from one system to another.  Live (or active) partition mobility allows you to move a running logical partition, including its operating system and applications, from one system to another.  The applications do not need to be shut down.  Inactive partition mobility allows you to move a powered off (or deactivated) logical partition from one system to another.

Live Partition Mobility
Live partition mobility allows you to migrate running AIX and Linux partitions and their hosted applications from one physical server to another without disrupting the infrastructured services.  The migration operation, which takes just a few seconds, maintains complete transactional integrity.  The migration transfers the entire system environment, including processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users.

(actually quoted from the IBM training manual for IBM course AU78 “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations”  a training class I took in July of this year) and so it goes on… (I guess I just killed the “no long post” part at the beginning…)  This has to be the coolest thing I have ever seen/witnessed/done in my life.  I setup an LPAR (logical partition) on a System p server, installed AIX 6.1 on it, then while another person in the training class was logged in and doing something in the server, I migrated it to another physical machine in less than 15 minutes with less than 5 seconds of down time (monitored with a CPU and HDD activity monitors running on the virtual server and a custom script that basically played the worm game and changed colors when the host system changed so we knew when it had actually made the switch)

Words cannot describe watching a multi-gigabyte installation of a server migrate to another physical box and keep working with less than 5 seconds of down time over the course of 12-15 minutes.  I am guilty of not having checked the total used size of the data drive, so I do not know how large the transfer was).  now to have this option in a freeware app that I can run on my Quad-core at home is very cool.  Especially since VirtualBox is currently my VM-app of choice.  Don’t get me wrong, I do/have used Virtual PC from Microsoft quite a good bit, but the configuration options and multiple VHD file format compatibility make VirtualBox the winner in that contest hands down.  Also, I have nothing against VMWare personally; however it is intensely confusing to go from Virtual PC to a VMWare workstation application and figure out what is going on and how to set it up without going back to “what already works… and is simple to use.”   Press release for VirtualBox 3.1

ok, after over 550 words, lets move on to the second half of my post (definitely not going to be a quick post… but then I always have a lot to say about stuff…)

OS and Web Browser share reports… Windows XP and Vista and MAC OS X are down, Win7 and Linux are up.  Firefox and IE8 usage are up, IE6 and IE7 are down, and everybody else, well no comment was made… original article is here on ZDNet - FYI how/where this info came from is sited on the ZDNet page.

right few comments about the above, first interesting how Firefox #’s are combined for all versions, does that mean Mozilla does a better job getting people to upgrade? or that Firefox users are less likely to fall very far behind on versions? same thing goes for the Safari #’s. yes Safari and Chrome are mentioned in the #’s, but no comments were made as to their rise or fall.

(completely unrelated, but I am listening to Pandora right now on my Sprint HTC Touch and they just played “Coloured Rain” by Slade, whom I have never heard before, at least not knowingly.  They are a British Rock band from the 70’s and I could have sworn it was The Beatles when it started playing…) (a note on that note, I Bing’d “wikipedia the beatles” and on the first page I got the Wikipedia page on the Beatles in the following languages, but not English… in order: sco, simple, nl, fr, ro, it.  I know what all of those are, except ro (Russian? it doesn’t look Russian)…  there were other results, including 2 Beatles albums’ pages on Wikipedia in English…)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• continuing on in June/July 2009…