Moblin Beta and VirtualBox

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on May 20, 2009 at 4:47 pm

Yesterday I installed Moblin version 2 Beta on my Asus eeePC 901, a netbook with a little Atom processor in it. It's been fun to walk it around with me yesterday and today showing people the future of our work here.

I thought it would be kind of cool to try it out in a virtual machine on my Core i7 desktop system (previously code named Nehalem).

So I loaded up the latest VirtualBox v2.2 from the web site, copied the .img file, and fired it up.

The live CD install went well, and to my pleasant surprise, before too long I was gazing at the M-Zone. Everything worked! I was surprised because Moblin makes a lot of use of the 3D graphics subsystem and needs compositing working before it will work correctly. But I was able to navigate around reasonably well.

Now it wasn't perfect. The animated desktop didn't really function the same way it would on a real netbook. In fact, the animations didn't work at all. And the screen size seemed off for some reason. But as I said, it was at least serviceable.

I did set up the virtual machine to have 3D acceleration enabled and threw 64M at the virtualized graphics card.

Categories: Mobility, Open Source, Virtualization

Comments (18)

May 21, 2009 2:38 AM PDT


Lim, Ghim Boon		 Hey, glad to see Moblin getting some attention in Virtualbox environment. I was wondering how you got the Guest Addons installed in Virtualbox. I tried to install it, but I can't seem to find cdrom in fstab. Do I need to install anything extra to get it to recognize the Virtualbox CDROM in order to get the Guest Addons working?

Thanks :)
May 21, 2009 6:01 AM PDT


ls		 VirtualBox guest additions cannot be installed on Moblin 2.0.

I hosted the additions into a web host, downloaded them with wget and mounted them. When I run them it gave me an error to install GNU Make.
May 21, 2009 9:44 AM PDT


Allan MacKinnon		 Ah, thanks for confirming that VBox is responsible for the sluggishness. I was surprised to see choppy animation on my very fast machine running VBox 2.2 and OpenSolaris on a DG45ID mobo.

However, I'm disappointed that the software "fallback" isn't faster. Some of the compositing effects and animations aren't that intensive and should be much faster given Atom's SSE capabilities (in fact, they should be blazingly fast even if in implemented in pure software).
May 21, 2009 12:09 PM PDT


dave		 could somebody tell me how to install moblin v2beta in virtualbox on mac os x?
i googled the whole web -> nothing!
May 21, 2009 7:56 PM PDT


Douglas Gottlieb		 Moblin for Mac OS X in Virtual Box? I'd like to try that too
May 21, 2009 8:07 PM PDT


James		 The VirtualBox guest additions mount under /media/VBOX*. You need gcc, kernel headers, make and possibly some others. I managed to install the guest additions, however, after restarting I was only getting a blank white screen.
May 22, 2009 1:40 AM PDT


Marcin		 Yep you can install addons but distro will not start up after that. I have the same experience as James.
May 22, 2009 1:49 PM PDT


pro		 I confirm: I got blank screen after installation :(
May 24, 2009 3:04 PM PDT


Mat Peters		 I got moblin beta running in Max OSx Virtual box.
There are a couple of down-sides:
1) screen resolution is terrible; at 800x600 the moblin menu does not fit corectly
2) There is no cdrom mounted. Tried to Install Guest Additions, and moblin does not see the cdrom under /media
3) The default web browser (clutter?) is pretty lame. If you explore the Applications Menu you will find an internet browser, which happens to be an unbranded (minefield) version of Fire Fox.
4) there appears to be no support for right-click (double-finger tap on Mac touch pad)
5) animation is so-so
6) could not change the desktop background, even tho there is a tool for this.

I enjoy the speed of start-up, but this is no-where as sophisticated as Ubuntu, yet.
May 24, 2009 4:14 PM PDT

David Stewart (Intel)
David Stewart (Intel)Total Points:
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Black Belt
 Mat - as I said in the post, the screen size and animations are not working properly in virtualBox. Try it on a Netbook!
May 26, 2009 1:52 PM PDT


h3		 I've tried with the standard setup but it failed to boot.. I enabled "PAE/NX" and it booted.

However the performances where horrible, the system was barely usable. It took me ages to install it.

The first boot was OK, but the system was still really slow. I also got the screwed menu icons and the OS apparently dropped animations.

I rebooted enabling those options:

Enable IO APIC
1200mb base ram
128mb video ram
3d acceleration

Sadly the system wasn't much faster after.. It reminds me the performance issues I got when I installed KD4, it feels like all your CPU cores are dedicated to render glossy graphics.
May 27, 2009 12:02 AM PDT


Captain Fancy		 I got the Moblin 2.0 beta going under VirtualBox 2.2 on Xubuntu 9.04 as follows, but the performance is still horrible:

- Create a virtual machine with Fedora 64-bit as guest OS (that's what I chose - don't know if 32-bit would be better).
- Enable PAE/NX in the VM's settings. (Others have said this is necessary, though my first attempt seemed to work without it.)
- Boot from the live CD image
- Choose the option to boot and install
- Go to Applications and Terminal, become root ("su -") and use yum to install gcc and make. (I also installed kernel-netbook-devel.i586 but I don't know whether that was necessary.)
- Reboot to be on the safe side
- Go to Terminal and become root again
- Make a directory to mount your CD-ROM drive: "mkdir /media/cdrom"
- In the VirtualBox menu do "Install guest additions"
- In the Terminal do "mount -t auto /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom"
- Then do "cd /media/cdrom"
- Do "./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run". The guest additions should install.
- Type "poweroff" to shut down the VM.

If you boot up now you'll get the blank white screen like others above have experienced. So:

- Disable 3D Acceleration in the VM's settings.

The machine now boots and will arrive at the desktop, and the desktop is big enough for the menu bar to fit (unlike before the Guest Additions were installed). Mouse Integration also works but it's a real pain trying to get the menu bar thingy at the top of the Moblin screen to appear with this turned on. So:

- In VBox's Machine menu (at the top of the VM window), disable Mouse Integration.

Now you can open all the menus and applications and everything in Moblin works (save for the odd segfault), but it's dog slow. That's the best I've managed so far.
May 27, 2009 2:18 PM PDT


pro		 GREAT Captain fancy!!!
this trick works also with VirtualBox under OSX
June 10, 2009 12:37 AM PDT


lokman		 I followed Capt Fancy's steps for my VBox 2.2.2 Guest Additions install on OSX 10.5.7 and it worked with these results:
- mouse integration is on and it's ok. no issue with the taskbar/menu on top.
- multitouch still doesn't work.
- gui/mouse response is much2 better (useable), compared to without the guest additions.
- desktop can be resized arbitrarily, by choosing 'mirror screens'.
- the menu bar DOES NOT resize lengthwise to follow the screen width. so it looks a bit ugly and the system status info (network, battery, volume, etc) crammed and overlapped into one area.

One more thing, kernel-netbook-devel.i586 is required, otherwise the Guest Install will fail.

In summary, the Guest Addition for VBox is necessary to make it useable.

July 11, 2009 9:42 AM PDT


Stephen		 Captain fancy, good trick, followed these steps on VBox v3.02, so I'd just like to confirm this works on that version. Does anyone know why it runs so dog slow?
July 16, 2009 8:48 PM PDT


johnny		 it is dog slow on Vbox3.02,i think it is because Vlbox has not supported moblin yet ,so some drivers in the guest additions are not available for us,but i am sure sooner or later moblin can perform perfect on the Vbox ,maybe just int the next version.
July 21, 2009 1:43 AM PDT


Yong Khun		 Has anyone found out why it is terribly slow when running Moblin in VirtualBox? How to overcome it?
September 25, 2009 12:16 AM PDT


Netty		 Can anyone explain why I cannot get any of the disk images to boot up in virtual box in OS X it either refuses the image or stays on a blank screen!

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