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VirtualBox beta 3 works on Mac OS X Leopard!!!

So finally, finally, finally I am so excited that VirtualBox works on my macbook pro. I felt really frustrated with the speed of Q today. I was trying to install some packages while compiling evas in kubuntu inside Q but it was so very slow. I can hardly switch apps. I don't know why but I just felt may be there is a new version of VirtualBox that will run on mac. Don't know why, I just had the feelings and lo and behold, there it is -- a new announcement on VirtualBox webpage about a new Beta 3 release for mac. Am I excited! I knew it would work on my Mac Leopard because why else would they release it? I started downloading the new package even before reading the news on the site.

While the app was downloading I went ahead and read the complete details and I could feel the happiness inside when I read this sentence from the news "The new version sports seamless guest support and live dock tiles as well as numerous improvements and bug fixes. It goes without saying that it runs on the most recent version of OS X (Leopard).". There you go. Just what I wanted to hear (see).

I installed it and of course I created a new VM for gentoo and launched the install cd from VirtualBox. It runs! It runs! And it feels so fast too (compared to Q). Just for kicks I wanted to see how Q vs VirtualBox performed. I launched kubuntu live cd from VirtualBox and Q 3 times in a row in each VM and timed them from the minute I launched to the time that kubuntu is fully loaded (with all the tasks in the taskmanager). VirtualBox took 1:28 (1 minute, 28 seconds), 1:43 and 1:28 in the 3 consecutive runs. Then I launched kubuntu live cd from Q. But even after 5 minutes kde is not completely loaded. I stopped after 5 minutes. I ran it 3 times and each time I waited 5 minutes and killed it because it was taking too long. That was enough to convince me that VirtualBox is so much more faster than Q, which is understandable since Q is more of an emulator while VirtualBox gets to use the native support from the processor (VT-x). But wow VirtualBox is soooo good. I would never use Q again after this. There I said it.

Now to install Gentoo...

Comments

Anonymous said…
I know this was an old post, but you say that VirtualBox uses VT-X for Mac OS X hosts. Really? Or was that a typo? 'Cuz my guest OS's are really slow on a Mac OS X host compared to a Vista host, and I thought the lack of VT-X support had a lot to do with this. If you know how to get VT-X to work on a Mac OS X host, can you tell me how? Thanks....
September 28, 2008 7:54 PM
Re-ynd said…
You are right. I later found out that although the option is available in settings, it does not actually work on a mac. Sorry for the wrong information. Will fix it now.
September 29, 2008 12:12 PM
Johan Louwers said…
Shame it is not supported, when I was searching on Google I found this post and was under the impression I was about to read the solution to make this work!! :-)

Damnn.... still not... I have a lot of problems because of VT-X is not supported on a mac in Virtualbox...

Maybe some day it will be :-) who knows :-)


Keep blogging!

regards,
Johan Louwers
December 07, 2008 10:09 AM
Anonymous said…
I just read a post by a guy from Sun stating that VT-x for VirtualBox on Mac is coming soon. (http://vbox.innotek.de/pipermail/vbox-users/2008-November/004393.html)

Have patience, it's coming!
December 15, 2008 7:27 PM
Re-ynd said…
Meaning to write this for a long time, but got distracted. So VirtualBox 2.1.0 and later support hardware virtualization on intel macs! You can enable VT-X now. However in my tests enabling vt-x slowed things down a bit rather than improve. But if you need it, you have it :)
February 25, 2009 8:52 AM
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