On Wednesday 16 September 2009 15:53:10 geoffrey mendelson wrote: > On Sep 16, 2009, at 3:38 PM, Amos Shapira wrote: > > I've never considered VirtualBox (or VMware, for that matter) for > > anything except that it's included in Ubuntu for desktop, and it had a > > very easy interface to setup Windows quickly. > > I saw the reference to libvirt in the RHEL 5.4 announcement and might > > use it to convert our home-built tools to ease migration from Xen to > > KVM. > > Just as a comment, I run virtualbox under MacOS and it works perfectly > fine. So far I've run Windows/XP and Windows 7, DOS, and Ubuntu > virtual machines and they work. Complete with network support and USB > devices that MacOS won't support. >
And I've used the Mandriva package of Virtual Box successfully on my Mandriva Cooker system, without any major problem I could recall, and it's a life- saver. While it does have an enhanced proprietary version, the open-source version (fully GPLed, etc.) works perfectly well, and is 100% open-source. If anyone misses the features in the proprietary version, they are allowed to develop them on their own while complying with the GPL licence of Virtual Box. See for example what was done with SugarCRM and vTigerCRM. I should note that this is not the first time, an open-source project had proprietary versions. For example: Ghostscript (with its GNU/GPL versions and the more recent sourceware but proprietary one), X-Windows (with various proprietary spin-offs), SleepyCat's Berkeley DB (a strong copyleft licence, with a commercial version), Qt (formerly GPLed, now also LGPLed), Cygnus offered commercial support for GNU software which was kept open-source and GPLed, and there's also naturally RHEL with CentOS and other free clones. So I don't think you can claim the open-source version of Virtual Box is not FOSS. My machine does not have any hypervisoring extensions (which rule out KVM) and I'd rather not run Xen directly as the hypervisor [Xen] so Virtual Box seems like the best solution and it works very well. Virtual Box was a simple "urpmi" (= Mandriva's equivalent of "apt-get" or "yum") command away, and it's a native Mandriva package, which says: <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< shlomi:~$ rpm -qi virtualbox Name : virtualbox Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 3.0.6 Vendor: Mandriva Release : 1mdv2010.0 Build Date: Thu 10 Sep 2009 18:16:26 IDT Install Date: Fri 11 Sep 2009 10:14:15 IDT Build Host: n1.mandriva.com Group : Emulators Source RPM: virtualbox-3.0.6-1mdv2010.0.src.rpm Size : 37003949 License: GPLv2 Signature : DSA/SHA1, Thu 10 Sep 2009 18:41:02 IDT, Key ID dd684d7a26752624 Packager : Frederic Crozat <fcro...@mandriva.com> URL : http://www.virtualbox.org/ Summary : A general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware Description : VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I do wish Fedora supported it better, but it seems that Fedora is not very inclusive. Regards, Shlomi Fish > So while you may have had problems with it under Ubuntu (I won't go > into how many problems I have had with Ubuntu), I would not discount > it entirely in other enviornments. > > It fits my needs quite nicely, I'm sure it does not fit everyones. > > Geoff. > [Xen] - back when I worked as software developer for a company that developed 10 Gbps Ethernet adaptors, my niche ended up as being in charge of making sure our (open-source) Linux drivers ran in Xen (and Xen Enterprise) and on VMWare ESX. Xen Enterprise which was based on the 2.6.x kernel just worked and gave me very little trouble in my testing. VMWare ESX was based on an old Linux 2.4.x kernel, and caused me many problems. It only recognised one port of our two port card (of no fault of our driver - it was a global problem with ESX), and gave me many other problems. I recall that I kept needing to re-install VMWare ESX on that machine. As a result, I spent much more time on ESX and really hated it. I should note that the VMware people were very fair to us, and we were given read access to the code inside their Subversion repository, and other forms of support. I'm also pretty sure VMWare ESX is a very decent virtual machine server, but as a drivers' developer, it gave me a lot of trouble. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Understand what Open Source is - http://shlom.in/oss-fs Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
