I want no monuments

Past week I needed a Windows box (sad but true) and my linux boxes stared at me praying not to coexist with the Evil. I pleased them looking for an emulator.

I tried setting up VMWare player but the screen color depth is limited to 8 bit.
I find it amazing that windows people have to deal with these graphical installers that refuse to run if your resolution is too low. I’m installing a server! Why the hell do you complain about the screen color depth!?
Anyway, that was an issue and VMWare didn’t solve it.

I tried QEmu: good and fast enough. Too bad I’m not a sysadmin and I wasn’t able to set up the network interfaces properly so I couldn’t connect to the server running in the virtualized Windows from my Gentoo box, acting as the container.

Then I tried VirtualBox and everything went fine: it is a fast emulator, its GPL version is almost feature complete and it is developed by the german firm Innotek.
I’ve found instructions on how to properly set the network up on gentoo-wiki. Here is my /etc/conf.d/net file

config_eth1=( “null” )
tuntap_vbox0=”tap”
config_vbox0=( “null” )

config_br0=( “dhcp” )

bridge_br0=”eth1 vbox0″
depend_br0() {
	need net.eth1 net.vbox0
}
brctl_br0=( “setfd 0″ )

The only oddity is that I need to run some commands as root: so I’ve created the following script

modprobe vboxdrv
chown root:vboxusers /dev/net/tun
chmod g+rw /dev/net/tun

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Gentoo, Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.