hoffies blog

I’ve recently tried to get arch linux working inside virtualbox – I just wanted to try it out as an ex-gentoo user just switched to it… but I gave up pretty soon as networking didn’t seem to be working. Then I found out that everything could have been handled by dhcp… you get the proper IP and so on. I tried pinging google.com, heise.de… none of them worked. Some minutes ago I decided to just ask in #vbox (Freenode) and achimha, a user there, told me to simply try accessing a web page in a browser… Well, I didn’t have a browser ready yet so I tried syncing pacman’s (arch’s package manager) database and it worked. So, remember: When using virtualbox and the “NAT” type of network, don’t expect external ping to work and be happy :)

Well, VirtualBox was released under an opensource license on 2007-01-15. I thought about creating a simple ebuild for it but then decided just to wait for an official one. And I even didn’t have to wait long as jokey had already committed an ebuild to his overlay (which some hours later showed up in the official tree). I instantly tried it and well.. there were some problems (as86_encap: No such file or directory and so on) while trying to install the package dev86 (a dependency for virtualbox). After some debugging attempts I decided to ask jokey directly, but he could only tell me that it was working for him. However, the conversation pointed me into the right directions… it was paludis’ fault (later I filed a bug report for it). That was the first problem… but there were more: VirtualBox didn’t compile for me and I could not get any information for debugging that.. well.. because.. somehow the virtualbox build process screwed up the console font each time (like you were doing cat /usr/bin/* or something :p). Again I asked jokey and after some time he suggested me to try to upgrade to ~arch libxslt (and so libxml)—and this was the solution (for the build problem)! I still get console font breakage when compiling virtualbox, but as it completes successfully that’s hardly a problem for me (btw, the console font problem doesn’t seem to affect all users; virtualbox’ dependencies were updated to list the newer libxslt).

So, I now (to be exact: since yesterday) have a working virtualbox environment and it looks pretty nice. It’s fast compared to qemu (someone said qmue emulates a complete cpu while vmware and virtualbox just rewrite the code to be safe…), compiles with latest stable gcc (while qemu does not), is free software (in contrast to vmware) and looks less bloated than vmware.