Kirya [.net]

Thanks to Philipp Hug and Patrick Winnertz, virtualbox is now available in Debian.

I have just installed my first virtual machines, and I am now able to run Windows 2000 or Ubuntu from my Debian box. I was using Qemu until now, but the performances (despite the Kqemu accelerator) were quite bad, and I simply couldn’t run any Linux 2.6 based distributions with the kqemu active.

Setting up virtualbox is really easy, just run aptitude install virtualbox virtualbox-source, compile the vboxdrv module (I have used module-assistant), add your user to the vboxusers group, and that’s it!

I only had to download manually the guest additions iso image from http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.4.0/, as the VirtualBox manager wasn’t able to find it automatically.

You can launch the VirtualBox manager from the graphical menu and set up your first virtual machine.

Update (9/5/2007): 1.5 release has been uploaded with a new package name: virtualbox-ose. The aim is to avoid any possible trademark issue (see #440792).