peteg's blog - hacking - mac - 2011 12 21 VirtualBox

Goodbye VMware Fusion, hello VirtualBox

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I got sick of VMware Fusion 3.1.3 failing to bring the bridged ethernet interface back up after sleeping, and figured that it wasn't worth $US40 to find out what the newer v4 does on the now near-obsolete Snow Leopard. Time to try out the free/libre VirtualBox that so many people have mentioned.

Well, installing Debian is easier than ever. Configuring the network was quite tricky though, as I have a relatively complex setup. The first adaptor is a NAT interface for talking to the internet. The second is the ethernet bridge that serves TFTP and NFS to the ts7250 ARM board when I'm hacking it, and the third a host-only adaptor so I can SSH into the virtual machine. That all seems to work OK. The bridged ethernet is even more reliable than before: it always comes back after sleep, and the TFTP boot does not time out like it used to under VMware.

... and then there is the USB connectivity: I plug the FTDI-based AVR programmer into the virtual machine so I can make install there. This doesn't work too well with VirtualBox due to this bug, though cranking the number of CPUs down to one does get it to go: I can program the AVR using it. The USB performance seems a bit dire though, and this is one area where they lag VMware by a long way.

I don't know if the graphics emulation is much chop as I use X11 over SSH to (only) run Emacs.