Puppy in virtual box

[Djof]

Hi everyone. I recently set up a vm using sun's virtual box. It is my first time playing around with virtualisation and I'm impressed at how simple it was. My only problem is that I can't seem to get the screen resolution right. I'm stuck at default 800x600 resolution but my panel's native resolution is 1680x1050. My computer came equipped with NVIDIA 9300 series GPU. (Dunno if that bit of information can help).

Thank you for any help!

[Bruce B]

Some times with the emulators you need Xvesa

Type Xvesa -listmodes, maybe you can learn the spectrum of Xvesa resolution, color depth options supported by your 'emulation'.

[TechObsession]

Can the puppy linux be stored on a 512 MB flash drive? I have a kingston flash drive i got from a gadget gifts online shop and I wanted to install the puppy linux into it so that when I plug the usb drive, my laptop could boot from it with the puppy linux. However, my laptop has a leopard OS installed and i would like to boot the default os when I unplug the USB. Is this possible?

[Djof]

Thanks, Bruce B. I'll try using xvesa? But won't I need the proprietary NVIDIA driver ? Is that even ported to puppy?

[MU]

virtualbox emulates a vesa compatible graficscard.

Quick instructions: (Windows XP or newyearspup02)
Install virtualbox by running the downloaded installer, but before, in Puppy, you should create these symlinks pointing to a drive outside pup_save.2fs:

/opt/VirtualBox-2.1.4
/root/.VirtualBox/HardDisks

In Puppy, you need devx_412.sfs, so that the installer can compile the kernelmodule. Depending on your puplet, it might be named different. In newyearspup02, it is: devx-Xorg7.4-gtk2.14.4-r1.sfs.

After installation, type:
modprobe vboxdrv
cd /opt/VirtualBox-2.1.4
./VirtualBox

In Windows, click on the new icon on your desktop.

Then click on "new" to set up a new VM.
I assigned 512 MB virtual Ram, my computer has 2 GB physical ram.
It forces you to create a new virtual harddisk, I chose here "grow" 1.25 GB.
Then add a CD drive (check "from iso-image").
Set as Iso image a Puppy iso, I chose newyearspup-02-rc3-midi.iso.

Then start the VM.
This really knocked me off, it is SO fast, even with grafical gimmicks like xcompmgr (window-shadows/transluscency)!!!

When Puppy booted, xorgwizard will run.
It should install the vesa driver (in newyearspup I chose "xorgwizard - force vesa").
As Vesa does not support widescreen, you cannot use 1650x1050 here.
Try other values like 1024x768, 1280x1024, or 1600x1200.
When you reached the desktop, run gparted.
I created 2 partitions in the virtual harddisk: 1 GB ext3, an 250 MB swap.
Then shutdown, and you can create puppys savefile.
In newyearspup there is a bug, and the savedialog stops. Type "reboot" to run it again, and confirm *twice* the dialogs.
When it restarts, Puppy should boot with the settings you chose at first start.

In windows XP the steps are basically the same as in Puppy, you just don't need symlinks or kernelmodules.

In XP, I also had installed qemu today. It is *extremely* slower than virtualbox, so virtualbox is really recommended by me.
Even the huge Java IDE Eclipse runs really fast, thought just 512 MB virtual ram are assigned (Processors are Athlon 2x2.6 (newyearspup) or 2.3 Ghz (Windows XP)).
When I switched to fullscreenmode, a colleague thought, I run Puppy as a native system from CD.

Mark

[Bruce B]

In XP, I also had installed qemu today. It is *extremely* slower than virtualbox, so virtualbox is really recommended by me.

Mark,

I read similar comments before. The idea of running operating systems on XP doesn't occur to me, therefore no XP / QEMU experience.

I have plenty of personal hands on experience with QEMU on carefully selected Linux hosts. The general average I'd say: QEMU runs at near native speed, which it is claimed to do when completely installed with the KQEMU module.

The module allows direct hardware access in many areas. Without KQEMU it runs slow, the reason being is QEMU emulates all hardware functions.

Unfortunately, what I don't read from the XP users is: Did they install KQEMU? Generally it's not mentioned one way or the other.

If not, I'd expect slow. I think page one on QEMU's website would infer as much. This is a QEMU/KQEMU type of installation, if speed is a consideration.

Bruce

[MU]

yes, I installed kqemu in XP.
I also in former tests had the impression, that qemu with kqemu in Puppy is not fast.
On my old pentium 700 I used it very seldom because of this.
The performance of virtualbox is much different, and reaches the speed of a commercial solution I used 4 years ago (forgot the name, I had to pay around 40 Euro for it). I think it was callled win4lin.
Mark

[Bruce B]

You got it. Win4lin I used it also and it was quite impressive to me.

But as proprietors will I can't find updates or support for that version now. It also wanted a kernel modification and would provide the kernel, but not for Puppy, only had a list of the major distros.

I've never really heard people reporting QEMU as being fast on XP, quite to the contrary.

I bet there is a significant performance difference when used on Linux.

Most operations are near native speed. The virtual disk reads and writes seem faster. CPU intensive operations are slower. What I mean is things like compressing big packages, encoding music, or manipulating big pictures. Then it seems about 40 maybe 50 percent native.