I would like some advice or running a VM (Virtual Machine) in openSUSE 11.4 and if the recommendation works with only a certain kernel version. Some that I see are:
These are just a few of them I guess. I have done very little with VM’s, so consider me to be a newbie on the subject. I would love to get a product recommendation and a link on installing it with openSUSE, if one exists. I do often install the most recent Linux kernel and so it would be helpful to know if you must stick with a single kernel version for it to work. I have plenty of disk space and so I could just create a separate openSUSE start-up if the kernel version was important.
I would love to use the VM to load other versions of Linux to see what they are doing, but also to load Windows XP. I have a HTML automobile manual on CD that I purchased for my Dodge Wheelchair Van and it only works with Internet Explorer 6. I have not been able to get it to work with anything else and so its important to get this to work again.
So, I would accept any and all suggestions and thank you in advance for your advice.
If the issue on the Dodge is the main reason to use XP, did you try to run IE6 on linux? Main Page - IEs4Linux Some people I know found their solution with tatanka instead of running a full XP and IE6, for similar issues.
OTOH, I know where your heart is, which is open source. A while ago I would have answered VirtualBox, but nowadays…
On 08/28/2011 08:26 PM, jdmcdaniel3 wrote:
>
> I would like some advice or running a VM (Virtual Machine) in openSUSE
> 11.4 and if the recommendation works with only a certain kernel version.
i’ve tried several and believe VirtualBox is the easiest…but, that was
a couple of years ago…so, i don’t know what is best/easiest now…
virtualbox is in YaST…
as i understand it it will compile against your running kernel, whatever
it is…(i guess if you then change kernels you will have to remake the
VBox)
as for a get started guide, someone else will have to point you to
that…believe it or not i’ve known a couple of folks who got it going
without the first look at documentation (me, and a guy in Washington
State i recommended it to after reading of all the trouble he was having
with VMWare on his Window’s machine…i just told him to try VBox
because it “just worked” and not long later i got a “thank you” from him…
you mentioned you have plenty of drive space…more important is plenty
of RAM…one thing you have to do is create the VM and assign it xx
amount of RAM…enough for the distro in the VM…and, of course you
also have to have enough left to run the host…
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobile” of operating systems!
I use VMware Workstation myself; I recently also installed player on a
machine (I am attempting to build an appliance in Studio with it, though
I couldn’t redistribute it because of restrictions on redistribution from
VMware) and noticed that the most current version has binary kernel
modules for 11.4 (sometimes they need to be built, and for some people
that’s not a trivial thing to do - but for you I don’t think that’d be a
problem at all since you understand how to build stuff).
VirtualBox is good, and if you don’t need the features that are only in
the paid version of VB, that’ll meet your needs most likely.
On Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:48:46 +0000, DenverD wrote:
> have a look at IEs4Linux
> <http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page>
>
> it will install an actual warty old IE6 that runs on your desktop!! all
> free and legal as long as you have a valid MS license…read the FAQ
Well, and as long as the sites you want to use IE to visit can cope with
IE6 - many sites won’t, and want IE7 or IE8. (I’ve run into that a
couple of times myself).
On 08/28/2011 08:50 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Well, and as long as the sites you want to use IE to visit can cope with
> IE6 - many sites won’t, and want IE7 or IE8. (I’ve run into that a
> couple of times myself).
he says he needs IE6 for a CD…i never heard of that, but James is a
smart Texas guy, so i believe him…
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobile” of operating systems!
On Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:56:18 +0000, DenverD wrote:
> On 08/28/2011 08:50 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Well, and as long as the sites you want to use IE to visit can cope
>> with IE6 - many sites won’t, and want IE7 or IE8. (I’ve run into that
>> a couple of times myself).
>
> he says he needs IE6 for a CD…i never heard of that, but James is a
> smart Texas guy, so i believe him…
D’oh! I somehow missed that IE6 was what was needed.
Knurpht, a few years ago, don’t remember exactly when, I did get IE6 to work in Wine, but while using it I was actually struck with a virus that infected that session. The exact details have faded, but I have not loaded a Windows anything in Linux since. I know that it can all be deleted, but then and there I decided if I was going to run Windows programs, I would do so in Windows with a current AntiVirus program running. Now, I was perusing the web when this happened and would not need to do so to run this CD, but none the less, I thought it best to use Windows programs with full AntiVirus support running at the same time.
DenverD, so your vote is for Virtualbox. I have read about it, though nothing I recall in reference to openSUSE. I did use VMPlayer on Windows many moons ago, but not sure they have a free product to try out in openSUSE. I am looking for a VM that works well with our chosen distro of openSUSE.
On Sun, 28 Aug 2011 19:16:02 +0000, jdmcdaniel3 wrote:
> DenverD, so your vote is for Virtualbox. I have read about it, though
> nothing I recall in reference to openSUSE. I did use VMPlayer on
> Windows many moons ago, but not sure they have a free product to try out
> in openSUSE. I am looking for a VM that works well with our chosen
> distro of openSUSE.
That’s what I’ve been using. I followed the instructions here to install it. The one thing I would add to those instructions is that haldaemon needs to be running when you start VMPlayer or it will just die.
Last time I compared end-user VM solutions (many months ago) - i.e., virtualbox and vmplayer, vmplayer was the best choice. Slight but noticeable better performance, shared folders, usb support, etc. I seldom have problems after a kernel upgrade, it usually recompiles its modules on the first subsequent run.
What I felt uncomfortable at first was the ET-phone-home possibility in a closed source app, but if it is there it is a most discrete ET :).
Also for linux guests installing the guest additions is not a trivial matter, it’s more complicated than, for example, installing nvidia drivers the hard way ™.
At the beginning vmplayer wouldn’t create VMs (you had to use vmware Workstation/Server for that) nor shared folders (needed samba or a pendrive to share files), but after virtualbox started competing in the market VMWare implemented this quite fast…
I still use vmplayer today and am quite happy with it. Of course, if you want performance you should look into bare-metal hypervisors, but that requires specific hardware and is in a totally different cost/effort level.
You don’t need a specific kernel for kvm (unlike Xen) - but you need a CPU that can do full virtualization (unlike for Xen which supports para-virtualization). Last but not least, libvirt and virt-manager can handle both Xen and kvm virtual machines and so could (in theory) vm-create, but it has never been tested with Xen. The script has a lot of options but is easy to use. It can - among others:
install any distro from anywhere to anywhere - meaning you can do a net install of a guest to a remote host. Of course you can do a net install of a guest to your local computer as well.
install locally any distro from a CD/DVD iso stored locally or on a remote host.
run live CD in (diskless) virtual machines.
You’ll find examples of installation in the links below :
I’m aware that I missed the whole openSUSE hypervisor features by going the kvm way - but Xen is getting less popular noawdays and I don’t want to play with Xen kernels (I did and it wasn’t fun). The url list for net installs has to be updated - and I don’t have time to do it now. You’re welcome to help - as well as anyone here. I’ve been using the script on openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, ArchLinux hosts with all the guests mentioned above + FreeBSD, openBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly. I definitely have ZERO intention to install Windows guests. When it gets about Windows, VirtualBox does a perfect job. I read that lib-virt and virt-manager are also able to administrate VBox virtual machines, just like Xen and kvm ones. But I have NO idea how … If someone has done that, I’ll ask him to write a howto.
I’m absolutely sure it’s needed on my system, which is 64 bit openSUSE 11.4, KDE 4.6.0, VMPlayer 3.1.4 build-385536. I don’t have haldaemon set to load on startup, so I have to start it manually before running VMPlayer, or VMPlayer simply dies. The terminal output when it dies:
process 32351: Attempt to remove filter function 0x7fb2e5462980 user data 0x95ab40, but no such filter has been added
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
I’m also sure it’s not unique to my system, because when I originally googled the problem I found lots of posts about it, including this one here.
Yes, I typically opt out, I’m more of a manual-update person. What concerns me (a bit) is what I can’t see. for example, perhaps two years ago, even unchecking all gui auto-update/stats options vmplayer would still try to connect at startup, you had to edit the vmx file to actually disable this behavior.
You probably can still find references to this in vmware’s user fora, there was a lot of angry posts then, until a vmware person posted what to edit in the vmx file - I got the impression that the guy was not happy about doing it…
