virtualbox – Page 3 – Kev's Development Toolbox

February 1, 2015

Upgrading OS/2 Warp 4 to the latest fixpack14 (and other useful stuff)

Windows 10 is on the way. So I spent the weekend installing and configuring OS/2. 🙂

Since OS/2 was recently released into the public domain, you can pick up copies of the install disk images from archive.org. As you work through the install, at some point you realize you need to convert or find out how to use the floppy disk image files. When installing to a VirtualBox VM, I found I couldn’t get the disk images to work from archive.org, but the ones in the format from WinWorld here work flawlessly.

WinWorld has iso images for 4.0 and 4.5x but I could only get 4.0 to install to a VM disk. That’s not an issue as you can download and install FixPack15 with takes you to the latest (and last) version of OS/2.

Most of the updates I found I needed were covered in the extensive instructions on this site here. I found I didn’t need everything though (I skipped the USB mouse drivers as it seems running in VirtualBox takes care of making sure the guest OS sees the touchpad and keyboard on my MacBook).

Along the way there are a few utils that you need to gather to help with the install of the other steps, in particular:

diunpack (used to unpack the fixt144.dsk disk image in MPTS8620)
dskxtrct (used to extract all other .dsk images for the MPTS fixpacks)
unzip utils, most would work but I used this one, unzip 5.51
fastkick141 – I used this to install MPTS8620 – more below

So here was the list I narrowed down to:

Fixpack 15 – can be found in other places, but this zip on Hobbes contains everything ready to go. Unzip and run install.cmd
gengradd drivers for supporting higher display resolutions. I used gradd083.exe from here, Unzip it by running it and passing options ‘-dir -over’ to preserve the subdirs. Then start the install with: ‘setup gen’
MPTS8610 – fixpack for network driver stack. Prereq for 8620. Use dskxtrct to extract all the .dsk images to a temp dir and then run service.
MPTS8620 – this provides TCPIP32.dll that is needed for most of the more common browser releases (Firefox, Seamonkey etc) and other network tools. This one didn’t have a script to self-install. Use dskxtrct to extract all the .dsk images to a temp dir, apart from fixt141.dsk which I found would only uncompress using diunpack. To install, fastkick141 into the same dir as all the uncompressed disks, and then run (I think) fix.cmd.
A number of later apps, Firefox and Seamonkey, require a version of LIBC (you’ll get an error saying LIBC065 missing if you try to run without it).You can pick up a zip with just the DLLs from here, click the ‘just kLIBC’ link to get the zip. Copy the *.DLLs to c:\os2\dll
There are two additional dependencies for the latest browsers linked from the top of the page here – fntcfg and pthread. Download and copy the DLLs to c:\os2\dll

At this point I think you’ll be setup to run most of the more recent apps, including latest versions of Firefox and Seamonkey built for OS/2. Enjoy!

September 22, 2014

Mounting USB drives on an Ubuntu VirtualBox guest on Mac OS X host

If you’ve come across this already then this might be obvious, but in order to mount a USB external drive on an Ubuntu VirtualBox guest running on a Mac OS X host, you need to unmount the drive in Mac’s Finder first. Then using either click the USB icon in the status bar in your Ubuntu guest and you’ll see the drive un-greyed out (when it’s mounted on the Mac it appears greyed out and you can’t select it) – click it and it will mount automatically. Or you can do the same thing from the VirtualBox menu, Devices/USB.

December 6, 2013

Expanding a Virtual Box Windows XP virtual disk

The .vdi file can be expanded using the same vboxmanage command as here. To use the expanded diskspace in XP you can either create a new partition from within XP (using the Computer Management tool from Control Panel/Admin Tools), or you can expand the current partition size to fill the available space.

To expand an existing partition, you’ll need to boot the virtual machine with a ISO disk image containing some disk utils, something like GParted. Attach the ISO disk image to your virtual machine and boot it up. Use the GParted tool to resize the partition, then shutdown, remove the mounted ISO and reboot Windows. It will now see the expanded partition size.

October 15, 2013

Fedora 18 & 19 – terrible performance on Virtual Box

I’m not sure what the deal is with Fedora 18 & 19 but the performance running under Virtual Box in Windows, regardless of how much memory you throw at the VM, really is unbearably slow. I had 18 installed for a while but haven’t used it for several months. I just fired it up again and it’s unusable. Downloaded 19 and started the install and it took a couple of hours. I might have something else going on on my laptop that slowing down the performance, but as it is it’s unusable.

I was looking for a RHEL derivative other than Oracle Linux since I wasn’t prepared wait to download the massive disk images which are several GB (really?!). I just realized though that CentOS is RHEL compatible. Very cool. Will download and see if it’s more usable under Virtual Box.