Posts Tagged ‘VirtualBox’

A little while ago I installed VirutalBox on my Debian system so that I didn’t have to reboot my system when I wanted to watch movies instantly on NetFlix. I discovered with VirtualBox 3 there are some exciting new features. The first one is seamless mode. Selecting Machine from the menu bar and Seamless Mode your windows programs can interact with your Linux programs.

VirtualBox is an utility which creates a virtual machine on your computer. Essentially this allows you to emulate another computer within your computer in a single file. The result is giving you the ability to test different Linux distributions without having to overwrite your current system. In addition you can run a version of Windows XP inside of Linux. The main reason why I do this, is because NetFlix does not support linux for their Instant viewing, and I don’t with to reboot my system into WindowsXP in order to watch their videos. However, sometimes I have noticed a significant drop in video quality while doing this.

Debian Lenny’s repositories includes the opensource edition of VirtualBox; however, to get the updated prepriotary version of Vitual box you can add the following to you /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lenny non-free

Now add the keyring, update apt-get, and install:

wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc
sudo apt-key add sun_vbox.asc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.0

The install script will ask you to compile new headers. Afterward add your desired user to the vboxuser group and reboot for the new headers to take effect.