Now that VMware Servae 2.x has failed in openSUSE 11.2, I’m looking for a different virtualization tool. I’m hoping to use it for my iPhone and iTunes stuff on my currently dual booting windows 7, hoping to run that in a Vmachine from openSUSE rather than by dual booting.
Can you recommend a virtualization tool? I would like it to run windows 7 that is installed on a hard drive, i.e. not from a virtual partition but from a real partition; is that possible in a Vmachine?
I’ve heard of people doing something along those lines (booting a virtual machine using a physcial install of the guest OS, specifically Windows) in Virtualbox, but the bits and pieces that I’ve heard implied it might not be the safest way to go about things…
My experience thus far has been running virtual machines (strictly Linux guests at this point, though I hope to add a couple Windows guests as welll) in Virtualbox on my Windows Vista PC. No direct experience with running Windows guests on Linux hosts.
Good luck,
Monte
Thanks Monte, but I want to stay in openSUSE and avoid the multiboot as much as possible. I like windows 7, a superb piece of software, but I only need it as a “wrapper” for iTunes and iPhone, neither of which work in Linux.
Have you tried these apps in Crossover?
Thanks. iTunes 9 is listed as working in crossover. I will keep it in mind until I exhaust all other options, and maybe succumb, but I’d really like an open source solution.
Then VirtualBox is the way to go. What is your reason to want to keep the physical install, if I may ask?
AFAIK it’s possible to use one and the same Windu system both virtually and physically, though not at the same time :). Index page • virtualbox.org has some threads on it. I experimented a bit with this, but too much time went in reconfiguring broken drivers in the native Win. But progress has been made, people have managed to do this.
Swerdna, these instructions are for Windows XP, but they’ll give you an idea of what’s involved in virtualizing an existing Windows installation. If it was me – hate to tell you this – I’d just create the VirtualBox, reinstall Windows 7 in the box, re-register when it starts whining, and be done with it.
But that’s just me.
Thanks Knurpht & smpoole.
Why would I keep the physical partition of windows 7 you ask → because my wife uses it on the lappy when we go away and she can’t access her home machine.
So I’ll back up my iTunes on win 7 just in case and then try importing win 7 into Linux VBox.
Really? it took them years and two tries to deliver it considering from which corporation it comes; MS which has billions, has huge R&D, and a horde of programmers at their disposal and still it wasn’t enough.
As for VM, like others said, VBox is really nice and most of the time works flawlessly 
You want an open source solution to implement Windows/iTunes/iPhone. Do you see the irony in that?
I certainly do, and it’s irritating to say the least.
swerdna,
I’m sorry; I must have misunderstood what you were trying to do. I was thinking you wanted to keep your existing physical Windows 7 on a dual-boot machine, and run Win7 in a VM from the Linux side. I figured that if you ran the VM in ‘seamless’ mode, it would ‘appear’ as though you were just running iTunes on your Linux desktop - which is what I thought you wanted?
Monte
Quite frankly Monte, I’m not sure what I want ATM – but accessing iTunes in Linux via win 7 in VBox sounds good to me. I can experiment by putting a second instance of win 7 on my hard drive and loading that physical partition into VBox using the tips from smpoole7 and Knurpht. I’ll get back to you all with the outcome.