VirtualBox

VirtualBox

"VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)."

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Getting it

Ubuntu users can add it from virtualbox repos, but when 3.2 was released Oracle changed the name/key so you have to get a new key

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

VBoxManage

Besides the GUI interface for VirtualBox, you can manage your VirtualBox machines with the VBoxManage command line tool

Important Settings

Be sure to enable PAE/NX in the System -> Processor tab for your Ubuntu guests

Vagrant

"Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle's VirtualBox (ed.: as well as other virtualization engines), Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments."

http://www.vagrantup.com/

The MediaWiki project uses vagrant and provides instructions as well as the configuration itself so that you can setup a development instance in a snap. See MediaWiki-Vagrant

Shared Folders

Configuring shared folders in virtualbox for Quickstart development

1. Power down the Quickstart virtual machine.
2. On the host computer, start the Virtualbox management UI.
3. right-click Quickstart -> settings -> shared folders -> click the folder with the green plus on the right
4. Set the "Folder Path" to a path on the host computer. Give full read/write access.
5. Set the "Folder Name" to "shared". no caps. no vbox-
6. Ok -> Ok -> start Quickstart vm and this file should disappear.
7. Test by moving a file in the host computer into the host shared folder.

Learn more about VDI - Virtual Disk Images http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=8046

Other Projects using VirtualBox

See Drupal/virtualization

Gnu's Not Unix, because Unix is proprietary software while Gnu is software that respects your freedom.

General Public License = A sane copyright license