Tad's IT Blog
Posts tagged virtualbox
I Still Really Want to Try OpenSolaris
Jul 1st
Unfortunately for me, I’ve still been unable to get OpenSolaris 2009.06 to work for me, in any capacity.
It’s a shame, because I’m a total Sun fan, and would love to be able to start rolling with it – just I keep running into dorky issues that I would have figured would have been ironed out already. And, unfortunately for me, I’m in the middle of trying to get things done, and don’t have the time to fiddle with this to make it work for me.
When last I tried OpenSolaris, it was about a month ago when I was trying to get a good Unix/Linux install working on my laptop for development purposes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get OpenSolaris to properly work with my HP Pavilion dv7’s Atheros 2425 WiFi controller. So, with no network connectivity, I was a bit out of luck on using Solaris on that box.
Then, today I needed to set up a dev ColdFusion server, so figured I’d give OpenSolaris another try, and see if I could fire it up in a VirtualBox VM. However, that ended abruptly and badly, as I immediately got a series of kernel panic messages all over the screen, and the installation aborted before I could even get it underway.
As a note, I tried it with OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2008.11, tried it with PAE on and off, tried labelling it as 64 bit or not, etc – all with the same result. Just bombs out immediately.
So, I’m back to running Fedora – something I know will work without a hitch in a VirtualBox VM.
I would have thought, though, that someone from the OpenSolaris project might have already tested & worked the bugs out of running OpenSolaris in a VirtualBox VM – seeing as VirtualBox is owned by Sun now, and it’s the easiest tool any of us have for trying out a new OS. Hell, even Windows 7 worked great in a VirtualBox VM.
Hopefully my luck can improve on this, though, as I’d still really like to try OpenSolaris.
Ubuntu: Performance Issues
Jun 14th
Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows 7 Loaded in a VirtualBox
Unfortunately, after my super-rosy post yesterday on how easy it was to install Ubuntu drivers and get my ATI Radeon HD 3200 up and running with Ubuntu 9.04, I’ve unfortunately run into a number of graphics & general performance issues and other various funky issues that I’m still having to investigate.
While I’m sure that I’ll reach some more conclusions on this, hopefully someone else has run into same, and can assist me. They’re not show-stoppers, but are pretty annoying.
- Catalyst Control Center: After my first reboot after I triumphantly installed Ubuntu and the factory drivers from AMD, I have not again been able to get in to the AMD Catalyst Control Center — in either user-mode or root-mode. Tailing /var/log/messages, I get the following:
Jun 14 20:28:21 turbotad kernel: [35343.066031] amdcccle[13174] general protection ip:a48c4be sp:bfc8be88 error:0Not sure what that means, but I simultaneously lost the ability to do Google Earth in 3D. Hm.
- Google Earth: After one successful load and then reboot, Google Earth refuses to respect that I have a 3D driver loaded. It just says that it’s now going to start in emulation mode, and of course then performs terribly as it’s only using the CPU. Not sure what happened. Compiz still works just fine (albeit much slower than when I was running Fedora 10)
- Firefox is sluggish – very sluggish: It feels like everthing I’m doing in Firefox (including typing this blog post) is attached to a spoon in cold honey. Typing has a lag to it, Flash and JS performance is slow, and it gets REAL slow as you have a couple of tabs open. My laptop has 4GB RAM so I’m not RAM-hobbled, and while a Turion RM-72 is nothing to write home about in terms of speed, the box is significantly more responsive in Windows Vista. Which is horrible.
- Slowest VirtualBox Performance I’ve Seen: Despite other issues I was having with graphics drivers, I was able to get VirtualBox up and running on Fedora 10 and Fedora 11, and after loading up a VM on Windows 7, I was able to easily work in the VM in full-screen, just like it was a single-core host computer. But now, on Ubuntu, for some odd reason, I can barely even control the mouse, it is so sluggish. So, that’s another one I have to investigate.
Anyhow, no idea how many of these issues have an easy resolution, but I figured I’d at least post it so that I could start with the process.
Recent Comments