Desktop Games, Pt. III

I do hope to get back to discussing Oracle.  Unfortunately, I have been distracted by the end of the year.  More specifically, by a strong need to get my Federal Income Tax return filed as soon as possible.

Here's the problem:  The Fat Client version (there is a cloud version available) ofmy favorite tax preparation software (TaxAct) only comes in a Windows edition.  And, I no longer dual boot to Windows, and do not wish to start.  However, I have some old Windows licenses lying around which can potentially run in a VirtualBox environment.  So, installing VirtualBox rose to #1 on my priority list (and VirtualBox is now an Oracle Product, after all).

Here is where my recent experience sent me down the wrong path.  I didn't have VirtualBox installed on my new desktop.  And my first thought was to go to the Oracle site and download it, just as I had done with Java, Firefox, Eclipse, Android, etc.  And ... sitting there on the Oracle site, just ripe for the downloading was an OpenSUSE 11.4 rpm.  So, I downloaded it, installed it, and was rewarded by several screenfulls of error messages.  Based on my experience with Android, my instinct was to try to see what did get installed.  And, I discovered that I now had a startup menu item for VirtualBox, which started up just fine, and even allowed me to create a virtual machine.

What I didn't realize at the time was that there are two parts to a successful VirtualBox installation on Linux (and probably Windows as well).  One part is the installation of the VirtualBox manager.  What I had started was the GUI manager.  (There also is a command line UI, more about which later.)  The VirtualBox Manager allowed me to create a Virtual Machine quite easily, so easily, that nothing more need be said.  However, when I tried to start the machine and load an o/s, it failed miserably.

The other part to an installation is to add components to the Linux kernel which enable the actual emulation.  The prefered way is thru DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Modification System), which leaves the base kernel untouched.  But, OpenSUSE 11.4 does not support DKMS.  In which case, the installation script attempts to rebuild the kernel.  And my 11.4 installation did not contain the source files needed to rebuild the kernel.  Fortunately, the install log contained a helpful suggestion (set KERN_DIR=source directory).

So, I tried installing the source files, and wound up with a kernel which would not boot.  Fortunately, my original kernel was not removed, and I was able to investigate things in more detail.

What I found was that OpenSUSE did include all the needed VirtualBox packages.  Not for the most current version, but it include all the needed packages.  So, I started YAST, removed the package I had downloaded from Oracle, and installed what OpenSUSE distributed.  Then, I was able to create a VM and start loading Windows.  Which went smoothly, except for the following issues:

1. To have proper access to the Optical Drive, I had to add my logon name to the cdrom group.  I was impressed with how easy YAST2 made this.
2. The install kept looping.  It turns out there is a known bug in W2000 in the disk subsystem.  It is a race condition, which never shows up with physical components, but can happen with virtual ones.  The solution is to use the command line interface to add a delay to the disk system.  The command line interface looks interesting, and I may explore it some more at a later time.
3. To get a decent sized screen I had to install what Oracle calls the 'Virtual Box Additions'.  And this time, my OpenSUSE distribution did not help me.  Fortunately, the GUI VirtualBox Manager offered to go out and attempt to download them for me.  Which worked fine.

So, now I am in the 21st Century with a Real VM on my desktop.