Skip to main content

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Attesting General Power of Attorney in SF

Recently I had to go through the motions of getting a General Power of Attorney (GPA) document attested in San Francisco. I am an Indian by birth. My parents were trying to buy a house back in India for me. Since I did not want to travel to India they needed a GPA so that they can act on my behalf to sign all the documents required to buy the house. The problem however is that they needed it urgently because the seller lives in UK and wants to get all the things done quickly so he can go back. My parents send me a GPA document that they obtained from a lawyer. This is a document that will give the power to my parents to buy the said property in the document on my behalf. The lawyer said that I will have to get the document attested at an Indian Consulate in USA. The closest one for me is in SF and I can drive there in about an hour from where I live. So I though it will be like a day's work to get all the things done. I looked up at their  website  for the procedure to att
152 comments
Read more

XBMC / Boxee remote control android app

I have been writing a few android apps over weekends at home and during 20% time at Google. However I never actually released any of them in the android market mainly because they were quick and dirty apps that fit my needs but perhaps would not be appealing to the general public. One such app that I quickly wrote over a couple of weekends is a XBMC remote. The media center that I use at home is XBMC and I have always wanted to have more control and faster access to my media. Using my remote to navigate through the menus is not as fast. Especially when I wanted to queue a lot of music it is very slow. So I wrote this nice little app called "XBMC remote" for my android phone to control XBMC from anywhere :). Give it a try. Search for "xbmc" in android market and install it if you use XBMC as your media center. When you first launch the app you will start with this screen. You will have to setup your web server address, username and password (if required) by
18 comments
Read more

gtkdocize not found

If you are ever configuring an app and see the message "gtkdocize not found" in Gentoo, then you need to emerge gtk-doc. I had some hard time figuring this out so I am writing it in my blog for the next time. When I saw that error message I did an "emerge -s gtkdocize". Usually it is that simple in Gentoo. But not this time. The emerge command returned no results at all. Then I searched for gtkdoc and still no luck. After searching in Google, I still did not have a solution. After thinking for a while I decided to try to search for gtk-doc. Bingo! That worked! Interestingly, this is my first post from my Virtual machine :-)
7 comments
Read more