Virtual Box

[DunkB]

Hello All,

It's time to have a play, AGAIN!!
I am thinking of installing Virtual Box and moving most of my media server software to within the guest. I have toyed with the idea of virtualisation before and even followed Ian's KVM tutorial , but I always got stuck at the same 2 problems.

1) I couldn't make ssh tunnel through from putty on my laptop to the guest. (It must be possible, I'm just being thick)
2) forwarding or capturing the USB and PCI ports where my tv tunners are installed so i can run Myth.

I had always ignored VirtualBox in the past because my processor handles true virtualisation, but after my last failures I thought I'd give it a go.

So questions to the class before I get stuck in. Has anyone else got Myth to run in a VirtualBox guest seeing captured USB &/or pci cards? If so is their anything I need to watch out for?

I know I need to reinstall VirtualBox as at the minute I'm running OSE and USB pass through only works with the closed source version.

All comments greatly received, even if it's don't be silly it will never work.

Dunk

[Andy Horn]

For crying out load , have you taken leave of your senses

Seriously I use VirtualBox OSE for my VM's and I have to say it work's well, in fairness I am not sure about the USB stuff, all I do ismount my disk's as NFS shares and the VM's find them, well they would if NFS actually worked on my 10.04 box (waiting patiently for 12.04 LTS), there is a bug in 10.04 that affect NFS, something to do with portmap, whatever that is . Versions 10.10 and after use a different system for NFS and are apparently more reliable.

Getting back to USB, if a USB device is mounted on your host system then I see no reason why your guest O/S cannot see it via NFS, no doubt Ian will step in and confirm that I am either talking utter boll@@k's or that I am right.

Hope this helps....

Andy

[DunkB]

Hi Andy

The USB devices I want to pass from my host to guest are Freeview tuners.
In theory VirtualBox Close source has the ability to pass USB devices direct to the guest. Admittedly the examples I've read have all talked about USB Flash drives so I may be as you suggest totally mad
The whole business of passing files has me worried too. I know it the past there have been discussions on here about the best ways to access data on the guest drive. I was going to just use VirtualBoxes share folders to access the media files held on the host. Is this not a reliable way to access the outside world.

[Andy Horn]

I was going to just use VirtualBoxes share folders to access the media files held on the host.

I forgot about that , never done anything with that feature but I would imagine it will work fine.

Andy