Hi all
I installed virtualbox on an opensuse 11.1.
The “vdi” hard driver in which the windows XP virtual machine has been installed is on a dedicated partition of my hard disk, now I wonder what will happen upgrading to 11.2.
VirtualBox on 11.2 will automagically 
recognize the hard drive where is installed the windows XP virtual machine with all of its data and program installed:?
Have anyone had any experience to share?
roberto60 wrote:
> I installed virtualbox on an opensuse 11.1.
> The “vdi” hard driver in which the windows XP virtual machine has been
> installed is on a dedicated partition of my hard disk, now I wonder what
> will happen upgrading to 11.2.
> VirtualBox on 11.2 will automagically recognize the hard drive where
> is installed the windows XP virtual machine with all of its data and
> program installed:?
> Have anyone had any experience to share?
AFAIK, .vdi machines are “portable”, so you can get it running on any
VirtualBox installation.
That said, when installing openSUSE 11.2 and VirtualBox, your .vdi machine
holding windows xp, should run just fine. Just point the VirtualBox wizard
to the existing .vdi file
Greetings,
–
Camaleón
That’s also been my experience, with .vdi files portable across different distros, distro releases, and VirtualBox releases.
If you had your /home mounted on its own partition, and reused it when upgrading 11.1 to 11.2, VirtualBox should see the old settings directory, and automatically be set up like it was before the upgrade.
When I upgraded from 11.0 to 11.1, the only thing I had to do was add my user account to the vboxusers group; all of my previous settings stayed the same because I used the same /home partition.
srschifano wrote:
>
> If you had your /home mounted on its own partition, and reused it when
> upgrading 11.1 to 11.2, VirtualBox should see the old settings
> directory, and automatically be set up like it was before the upgrade.
>
> When I upgraded from 11.0 to 11.1, the only thing I had to do was add
> my user account to the vboxusers group; all of my previous settings
> stayed the same because I used the same /home partition.
While it is somewhat unlikely for most cases, my VB instance contained a DB2
server which in turn implies at least 3 additional users. I had to do some
game playing to match up the additional users with the proper user ID. For
some reason, the 11.2 upgrade to 11.1 did not retain the proper user/UID
for anything but root and the initial user. Subtle issue, easy to fix but
check this before trying to log on as one of the other users if you have
such a multiple setup.
–
Will Honea
Thank you very much, and one more question, do you advice to wait few days for the official release of 11.2 or it is not so difficult to update from the 11.2 RC 2 to the official release?
roberto60 wrote:
>
> Thank you very much, and one more question, do you advice to wait few
> days for the official release of 11.2 or it is not so difficult to
> update from the 11.2 RC 2 to the official release?
I’ll probably leave most of the machines on 11.1 for some time - I can’t
convince my users (or myself) that KDE4 is ready for production use. Just
too many little things that we use that don’t work right or are missing
right now.
I do have a sandbox machine that I’ve tried upgrading as well as clean
installs on. Up through RC2, the upgrade route has been less than
impressive here. I always try the upgrade since re-configuring the DB2
server and databases is a royal PITA but YMMV so if you have an idle
machine, try it with your configuration. Personally, I’ve always (9.x and
up) had much better luck going the clean install using the existing /home
to minimize the configuration process for the most part.
RC2 -> Gold shouldn’t be that much of a reach. It’s just getting to the RC2
point that is a challenge if you start from a previous release level.
–
Will Honea
So better a clean install of official 11.2 waiting some days, but if one wants to upgrade his /home partition from ext3 to ext4 is it possible?
roberto60 wrote:
>
> So better a clean install of official 11.2 waiting some days, but if one
> wants to upgrade his /home partition from ext3 to ext4 is it possible?
To date, I’ve only tried EXT4 in a virtual session, clean install. On the
native 11.1 playground I always specify EXT3 simply because the 11.1
version of Grub I have on the MBR can’t manage to boot the ext4
installation. One hassle at a time: EXT4 in is the todo box when I finally
see a clear benefit over EXT3 for my uses so I can’t say much about it.
–
Will Honea