The previous chapter covered getting started with Oracle VM VirtualBox and installing operating systems in a virtual machine. For any serious and interactive use, the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions will make your life much easier by providing closer integration between host and guest and improving the interactive performance of guest systems. This chapter describes the Guest Additions in detail.
FULL Windows 2000 virtualbox virtual machine
In the Devices menu in the virtual machine's menu bar, Oracle VM VirtualBox has a menu item Insert Guest Additions CD Image, which mounts the Guest Additions ISO file inside your virtual machine. A Windows guest should then automatically start the Guest Additions installer, which installs the Guest Additions on your Windows guest.
The version of the Linux kernel supplied by default in SUSE and openSUSE 10.2, Ubuntu 6.10 (all versions) and Ubuntu 6.06 (server edition) contains a bug which can cause it to crash during startup when it is run in a virtual machine. The Guest Additions work in those distributions.
Note that some Linux distributions already come with all or part of the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions. You may choose to keep the distribution's version of the Guest Additions but these are often not up to date and limited in functionality, so we recommend replacing them with the Guest Additions that come with Oracle VM VirtualBox. The Oracle VM VirtualBox Linux Guest Additions installer tries to detect an existing installation and replace them but depending on how the distribution integrates the Guest Additions, this may require some manual interaction. It is highly recommended to take a snapshot of the virtual machine before replacing preinstalled Guest Additions.
If you have a version of the Guest Additions installed on your virtual machine and wish to remove it without installing new ones, you can do so by inserting the Guest Additions CD image into the virtual CD-ROM drive as described above. Then run the installer for the current Guest Additions with the uninstall parameter from the path that the CD image is mounted on in the guest, as follows:
To share a host folder with a virtual machine in Oracle VM VirtualBox, you must specify the path of the folder and choose a share name that the guest can use to access the shared folder. This happens on the host. In the guest you can then use the share name to connect to it and access files.
For security reasons drag and drop can be configured at runtime on a per-VM basis either using the Drag and Drop menu item in the Devices menu of the virtual machine, as shown below, or the VBoxManage command.
With this feature, if an application inside your virtual machine uses 3D features through the OpenGL or Direct3D 8/9 programming interfaces, instead of emulating them in software, which would be slow, Oracle VM VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware. This works for all supported host platforms, provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.
Untrusted guest systems should not be allowed to use the 3D acceleration features of Oracle VM VirtualBox, just as untrusted host software should not be allowed to use 3D acceleration. Drivers for 3D hardware are generally too complex to be made properly secure and any software which is allowed to access them may be able to compromise the operating system running them. In addition, enabling 3D acceleration gives the guest direct access to a large body of additional program code in the Oracle VM VirtualBox host process which it might conceivably be able to use to crash the virtual machine.
With the seamless windows feature of Oracle VM VirtualBox, you can have the windows that are displayed within a virtual machine appear side by side next to the windows of your host. This feature is supported for the following guest operating systems, provided that the Guest Additions are installed:
To enable seamless mode, after starting the virtual machine, press the Host key + L. The Host key is normally the right control key. This will enlarge the size of the VM's display to the size of your host screen and mask out the guest operating system's background. To disable seamless windows and go back to the normal VM display, press the Host key + L again.
Normally, to change the amount of memory allocated to a virtual machine, you have to shut down the virtual machine entirely and modify its settings. With memory ballooning, memory that was allocated for a virtual machine can be given to another virtual machine without having to shut the machine down.
When memory ballooning is requested, the Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions, which run inside the guest, allocate physical memory from the guest operating system on the kernel level and lock this memory down in the guest. This ensures that the guest will not use that memory any longer. No guest applications can allocate it, and the guest kernel will not use it either. Oracle VM VirtualBox can then reuse this memory and give it to another virtual machine.
The memory made available through the ballooning mechanism is only available for reuse by Oracle VM VirtualBox. It is not returned as free memory to the host. Requesting balloon memory from a running guest will therefore not increase the amount of free, unallocated memory on the host. Effectively, memory ballooning is therefore a memory overcommitment mechanism for multiple virtual machines while they are running. This can be useful to temporarily start another machine, or in more complicated environments, for sophisticated memory management of many virtual machines that may be running in parallel depending on how memory is used by the guests.
At this time, memory ballooning is only supported through VBoxManage. Use the following command to increase or decrease the size of the memory balloon within a running virtual machine that has Guest Additions installed:
The more similar the VMs on a given host are, the more efficiently Page Fusion can reduce the amount of host memory that is in use. It therefore works best if all VMs on a host run identical operating systems. Instead of having a complete copy of each operating system in each VM, Page Fusion identifies the identical memory pages in use by these operating systems and eliminates the duplicates, sharing host memory between several machines. This is called deduplication. If a VM tries to modify a page that has been shared with other VMs, a new page is allocated again for that VM with a copy of the shared page. This is called copy on write. All this is fully transparent to the virtual machine.
In the Memory Size window, configure the RAM size of 1 GB (1024 MB) for the Windows 2000 VM and click Next. You can also increase the performance of your guest system by increasing the number of virtual processors in this window.
To create a new virtual disk for a clean Win2K installation, select Create a virtual hard disk now and click the Create button after configuring the disk size. If you have previously installed a Win2000 VM, you can add the virtual disk from this window.
You can check the option above to have users who will use the virtual machine enter a username and password. Otherwise, if no one else is going to use a VM, you can use your default user account for login information.
After installing Windows 2000 on the virtual machine, you need to install the Guest Additions software in order to use the hardware of your host computer on the virtual PC. This software is only required for Guest machines that you have installed on the VM.
If the image quality of the virtual machine is lower than the default, VirtualBox will warn you with a notification as in the window below. To change the color mode of the virtual machine from 8 Bit to 32 Bit, open Display Properties and change the value in Colors to True Color (32-bit).
After installing the necessary software for the virtual machine, you can now transfer files between the host and your virtual computer by drag and drop, or you can copy the text or texts in any file and paste them into the file in the VM.
When you install old operating systems such as Windows 2000 with Oracle software, the graphics memory can be 128 MB by default. You can increase this value by 256 MB by using the PowerShell tool from the location where your virtualization program is installed.
Although Windows 2000 is an old operating system, sometimes you need to install this system for use, especially use it on a virtual machine. In the following part, we will show how to download Windows 2000 ISO for VMware or VirtualBox and then install it.
If you cannot get Worms Armageddon working on your computer (due to e.g. hardware compatibility), you can install it in a Virtual machine. A virtual machine emulates an entire computer with all its hardware, separating the game from your real hardware/operating system and its problems or incompatibilities.
VirtualBox is a free desktop virtualization software from innotek GmbH. The following guide describes the necessary steps to set up a Windows virtual machine in VirtualBox and install Worms Armageddon on it.
Installing Windows onto the virtual machine should be fairly straight-forward. If you are unsure about something, select the default option. If you encounter difficulties, please consult your operating system installation guide.
Note: all changes are being done inside your virtual machine, and do not affect your computer. The Windows installation will format your virtual hard drive, not your real one. From your computer's point of view, all changes will be made to the virtual machine files. 2ff7e9595c
Comments