I’ve been playing around with VirtualBox some more today (more on it, and other virtualization related stuff might follow later). I got a Windows XP instance running fine (and fast!) in it. Still got some issues (shared folders seem not to work when logged in as a non-administrator user in XP, although I tend to blame Windows for this issue, not VirtualBox), played around with a little Linux installation acting as an iSCSI target for its virtual block devices, accessing them from Windows using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator, etc. Here’s a screenshot of all this.
I added a launcher for my Windows VM to my panel, which was simply running ‘VBoxManage startvm <VM UUID>’. This was not an optimal solution though, as I wanted it to show a little error dialog when something went wrong when attempting to launch the VM (eg because I forgot it was already running), when the virtual disk files aren’t accessible (because I forgot to mount the volume they reside on), etc.
So I cooked a little script which runs some sanity checks before launching the virtual machine, and reports any errors. Here it is:
