Build VirtualBox in Ubuntu 11.04

 

What is VirtualBox?
VirtualBox is a general purpose cross-platform virtualizer. It can be run on Linux, Mac, Windows and Solaris systems.

Purpose of VirtualBox

• Simultaneously run multiple Operating Systems in a single machine
• No hardware virtualization needed
• Test systems, software without effecting your running system
• Pack complete solutions as a virtual image to save the burden on configuring systems from scratch
• Save cost on hardware, power and other infrastructure needs to run multiple systems to achieve a purpose. 

Read the Complete features list.

Some Terminologies:

• Host OS : The system that runs the VirtualBox application
• Guest OS : Systems run inside VirtualBox application
• Virtual Machine (VM) : This is the environment which your Guest OS is running
• Guest additions: Some features to improve the functionality of VMs running in VirtaulBox

This post is about building VirtualBox 4.1.51 from source in a Linux (Ubuntu 11.04) host.

Prerequisites:

• Java Runtime Environment 
• Several packages and libraries for the Linux distribution
• Subversion client

Prepare your system:

• Installing necessary packages

$ sudo apt-get install gcc g++ bcc iasl xsltproc uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libasound2-dev libstdc++5 libhal-dev libpulse-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev python2.5-dev libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libcap-dev libxmu-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev linux-kernel-headers libcurl4-openssl-dev libpam0g-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libqt4-opengl-dev makeself subversion

If you run on 64bit machine (As I'm now) you'll have to install the following 32bit packages too.


$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs libc6-dev-i386 lib32gcc1 gcc-multilib lib32stdc++6
g++-multilib


(Note:I've copied the packages from VirtualBox web site but practically I've installed them one by one checking what that package really does. And some times the packages are named differently in other systems.)

• Install and setup Java RE 1.6.x

Check whether you have the Canonical partner repository is enabled in your sources.list

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sun-java6-fonts

• Setup the Java home in your system into environment variable. 

Append the following to the ~/.bashrc

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26"

Checkout the source code from VirtualBox SVN


$ svn co http://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk vbox

Building the VirtualBox

1. Navigate to vbox directory and run configure script

$ ./configure --disable-hardening

2. To build the VBox you need to source the generated environment script
$ source ./env.sh

3. Build the package

$ kmk all

4. Build and install the VirtualBox kernel module

$ cd out/linux.x86/release/bin/src 

$ make 

$ sudo make install 

$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv 

$ sudo chown user:group /dev/vbodrv 

Once the kernel module is installed and loaded in to the kernel, navigate to "/vbox/out/linux.amd64/release/bin" and you can run the VirtualBox by issuing the following command.
$ ./VirtualBox

 

That way you can build the Oracle's VirtualBox from source. For the easy of running you may create a local alias or a menu icon to run VBox.

$sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/virtaulbox ~/vbox/out/linux.amd64/release/bin/VirtualBox

VirtualBox source code is under GNU GPL V2.

Great (Presentations, knowlege sharing, entertaining, conference)

Past week was the biggest event we (WSO2) had in 2011. WSO2Con 2011. It's a successor of the WSO2Con 2010 and was 100 times improved. It wasn't a typical boring conference where attendants fall asleep after settling down in the hall. It was a dynamic and thrilled series of presentations and events lined up in two tracks.

In summery:

• Great keynotes from various speakers across the world
• For the first time, "Google" spoke in Sri Lanka
• Panel discussions were amazing where audience and panelists had hot discussions on various technologies
  
• It's not only WSO2 Products people interested about, they also impressed about our culture too
• At live demonstration on StratosLive, in few minutes the conference hall turned in to a hands on workshop (where folks fired up the laptops and started to work on SLive)
• It was great to hear how people use our products in their business, education and research
• People realized that, being an open source company does not mean being looser
  
• WSO2 is not a startup company any more!
• #WSO2Con was in the 70th position in trending topics in Twitter
• We don't settle, we are an agile company, we go where our customers takes us
• Pre and post conference tutorials helped the attendants to get some deep understanding in some areas of our technologies
• Sri Lankan cultural dances and Elephant rides gave an insight of our heritage to the foreign participants
• WSO2 Music Jam session showed that WSO2ers are not just bunch of geeks who married to computers - They got other talents too!
• It's not the technology that does magic, it's people who make the technology.

Looking forward to the WSO2Con 2012.

WSO2Con 2011- learn : share : middleware

If you are interested to know how enterprise grade middleware plays a major role in today's businesses and also in IT world in general, WSO2Con 2011 would be the ideal conference for one to be.

With the boost we got from last year conference, this time we have lined up speeches from more than 30 experienced speakers from more than 10 countries, tutorials by experts from WSO2 and Apache committers, and interactive panel discussions.

This will be a great opportunity to build your networks with different communities in the technology spaces like, distributed web application development, PaaS, SaaS, Cloud computing, Governance, Business process flows, etc. And also communities from government and corporate sectors.

Above three para's are the high level view of the event. For more details visit WSO2Con 2011 Event page.

Become an early bird and enjoy discounts and more great deals. - "REGISTER NOW".

Important Info :

• Agenda
• Venue

Happy Birthday Son

Today (27th March 2011), my little son celebrated his first year birth day. It was a fast year filled with joy and love. We went to the temple early morning, observe pansil and our son was calm and trying to control his noise and the active actions. We offered a tea session for an orphanage and we thought of making it a habit to offer some thing in our capacity to help them. (They also need all the things we need in our lives). And I want to set this example to my son, when he enjoys his life to maximum always think about those who don't have and care for them as much as possible. And there is a fine line to think when it comes to actually care for them. You should not treat them as a different person, it's not sympathy, it's actually equality and treat every one as humans. There is only two categories of people. "Good" and "Bad". He needs to identify those two types.

We arranged a simple dinner for our close relatives and every one had a good time with my son. He got lots of presents kisses and he enjoyed the day to the max!.

I wish a happy birthday and a bright future for my son Saveen.

Amma and Thatta loves you a lot!.