Get it from the revamped VPC homepage. What's new? Hardware virtualization is supported, x64 as host operating system, Vista as host and guest plus a couple other enhancements.

Having Virtual PC 2007 Beta, the virtual machine additions for Linux Beta plus a disc of Ubuntu 6.10 Linux sitting on my desk simply proved irresistible to me. Thus: create new virtual machine, slide in the DVD, and off we go.

That was the plan until I hit a snag: on switching from text mode to graphics mode, the screen garbled. Wait! I had seen this before: the emulated graphics card of Virtual PC advertises video modes it cannot actually display. And I sorted it out previously and blogged about it in mono::live. So I did the Ctrl+Alt+F3 dance and pasted the script - presto!

Now for the VM additions - of course used to the Windows way of things, I simply mounted the ISO image. Nicely opens up in the File Browser, where the f*ck is a Run As command here? OK, switch to terminal, su (I have to admit that took me a while including pestering a friend because I had already forgotten all the gory details). To spare you the details, after some twenty minutes of fiddling I decided to take a deep breath and actually read (gulp) the README that comes with the Linux additions.

Setup prerequisites step number two caught my attention:

A kernel module of the Additions is built at compile time. So, the virtual machine should have the Linux kernel source and build tools installed

No way. The mention of operating system & compile yourself makes me cringe. Thank you, but no thank you. I will live without the additions. There is no friggin way I am doing the dance, I am way too old, and sorry, this is 2006. I don't need that "power of Linux" if all administrative usability goes out the window (Note: I am a developer, and especially because I am one I totally balk at the idea of having to compile my applications / drivers before I can use them - that is ridiculous).

Oh, one minor roadblock was easy to solve - the networking stuff. System / Administration / Networking and then enable the Ethernet interface:

Now on to exploring.

Instead of risking my sanity by trying to install Virtual PC 2004 on my x64 box, I decided to go with Virtual Server 2005 R2 x64. Thankfully, this new release of Virtual Server allows installation on an XP host, and the setup experience was pleasantly uneventful.

Of course I ran into a snag - my default browser is Firefox, and the administration Web site didn't fully function with it. So back to Internet Explorer, and configure the first (existing) virtual machine:

I learned the following things:

• Do not forget to configure the network adapters. Otherwise connecting to your domain can be a challenge.
• Definitely enable Remote Desktop on your virtual machines, which brings me to the next item on my list:
• When renaming a virtual machine beware of your own cleverness. Especially if all your virtual machines were copied from a once-configured image, and you renamed one of those instance so that the original name no longer exists in Active Directory.

Other than that I have to say that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is a much better experience than Virtual PC 2004.

This blog entry confirms my findings from last Thursday - VPC's virtual networking does not work with WinVi. That basically shot down my idea of using Vista as the primary OS on my laptop, aside from the really slow performance and its tendency to hog enormous amounts of memory. I would have put up with the latter two issues, but my VPC images do need network access (Subversion repository access for one).

Via Virtual PC Guy's WebLog: New WinImage Beta with support for editing VHD's. Now that is not only way cool but actually extremely useful if you need that one important file from a virtual machine - now, and not wanting to wait for the vm to start up and then do the copy operation.

After quite some struggle, I got the mono::live CD to boot & actually work in Virtual PC. The first step to sucess is to create a new VPC image, and capture the ISO of mono::live for startup of your VPC image:

This thing will now ask you a couple of questions, such as country, keyboard layout, and screen resolution you would like to use:

Now for the stumbling block - mono::live (or Ubuntu, the underlying distribution, to be more precise) detects the graphics card emulated by VPC, however, uses the 24BPP mode with the VPC-emulated card only supporting 16BPP. Looks weird at first and had me stumped too. But I got help on GotMono.com (actual post, interesting snippet provided here for reference):

As far as I am aware, the easiest way to handle this is to just allow the machine to boot up all the way, and then when you can see the fuzzy background image (i.e., the stretched Mono logo) so that it looks like booting is complete, hit CTRL+ALT+F3 to bring up a command prompt.
 
Then type (or rather, cut and paste), this command, all on one line:
 
Code:
sudo sed 's/DefaultDepth\t24/DefaultDepth\t16/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /tmp/xorg.conf && sudo cp /tmp/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf && sudo killall Xorg

to restart the X server at a color depth Virtual PC can handle.

Because pasting didn't work the way I wanted it to, I ended up typing this stuff using US keyboard settings on a German keyboard (don't ask). Anyways: this did the trick! Now I can start exploring mono::live without having to reboot my machine.

This white paper explains the differences between Virtual PC and Virtual Server and discusses the scenarios in which it is appropriate to use one or the other. Download

Remember me complaining about InCD and how it gobbles up memory so you cannot use more than 1GB of physical memory with VirtualPC? Well, sometime in December I threw v4.3.0.5 off my machine to finally be able to use the full 2GB. Today I decided to risk a reboot or two to give v4.3.11.1 a shot - and Jehova! the new version works as expected. No more out of memory issues! Using InCD? Get the latest version here.

Benjamin Armstrong (aka Virtual PC Guy) posted a computer migration strategy using Virtual PC. Now that is kinda cool to be able to migrate the entire old computer into a virtual machine.

What would you think if you get this error message:  "The virtual machine could not be restored because there was not enough memory available on the host" (Commit Charge Total 628MB / 3433MB in Task Manager, roughly 1.5GB still freely available).

Of course, you blame Microsoft, because after all it is VirtualPC that gives you this error message. No, not this time. It is Ahead's Nero InCD (even in its most current version 4.3.0.5) which I need for my DVD RAM drive. Following the VPC FAQ entry and disabling (Task Manager / End Process) both InCD processes makes VirtualPC work like a charm. Now, what did Ahead do in InCD to make a system with > 1GB act up like that? I'd like to hear why.

Good to see that Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 is finally available for download. It includes performance improvements for XP SP2 machines (!) as well as fixes - check out the readme for details.