VirtualBox

Get the latest about the VirtualBox (for linux) at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

How to resize a disk drive for a virtual machine

Say, you have a 10GB drive for your virtual WindowsXP, but need more space. There are two ways, depending on the format of your virtual disks:

.vdi disk images

• Detach the disk image from the virtual machine in VirtualBox
• Run the following from the command line

VBoxManage modifyhd mydisk.vdi --resize <size-in-MB>

• Reattach the new expanded drive in the VirtualBox

.vmdk disk images

vmdk format is not supported for "--expand" at the moment, but you could get away with cloning it to a bigger image

• Create a new (larger) disk image in VirtualBox - this will be your new big disk.
• From the command line:

VBoxManage clonehd myolddisk.vmdk mynewbigdisk.vmdk --existing

• Detach the old disk and attach the new one to your virtual machine in VirtualBox
• Go to your guest operating system, and "expand" the current file system to the new bigger disk.

Generic VirtualBox install (might be depreciated)

To install VirtualBox virtual machine engine in Ubuntu from the repositories:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Then add your user to the virtualbox group.

In case you can not start the Virtual Box machines and get a message that you should install ...modules... package, try sudo apt-get install "the-corresponding-module-package". If you can not find the package in the repository (I could not find virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-25-generic while running 2.6.24-25 Ubuntu kernel version), try the following:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-source module-assistant
sudo module-assistant auto-install virtualbox-ose-source
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv start

Python2.5 dependency

VirtualBox 4.1 depends on python2.5, however, the latter is no more in Ubuntu 11.04. The solution is to get it like this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python2.5

Then do the Virtual box install.