Savannah W-ITS

After flipping between Vista (64 bit) and Fedora 8/9 I find that:

• Virtual Box under Vista integrates well but performance is somewhat less robust than when running similar VMs under Linux;  but hardware issues (specifically USB device sharing) seem to work well under Vista.
• Creating an NTFS native partition (or two) is quite useful if there is a need to share data across OS instances or when running under different primary hosts (the OS under which you run your VM.)
• In this case, using this type of setup allows me to switch between boot level OS installs (i.e. reboot the machine to run either Vista or Linux as a host OS) and still reach the same set of data.
• When using VirtualBox under Vista access to my MDA (Windows Pocket-PC/Phone) is simple and works well when running XP under Vista.  Running XP under Linux is another story – I have not been able to convice Linux/VirtualBox that my MDA should only be used by the Xp VM… (anyone have a solution?  note that using modeprobe.d/blacklist entries did not work – since the MDA support RNDIS it actually shows up as a network device – perhaps there is an IP to USB hack?)

One way to share data between both Various host OS’s and VMs (assuming you want to share between a Windows based host and a Linux based host):

• create an NTFS partition of adequate size for your scenario
• use this partition for your ’shared data’ (in my case, email data)
• install appropriate software under each OS or VM (i.e. the same version of software)
• adjust your application software to use the NTFS shared storage area as it’s default
• test, test, test (could be gotcha’s depending on the APP)

An example:

• I create a shared NTFS drive (i..e I label it ‘drive_G’)
• I install Eudora on each host OS or VM (in this case on Vista and on a VM that I can run under either Vista or Linux)
• I adjust the INI settings for Eudora to point to the shared drive for data storage (this may require some OS level research to confirm that you are using the same drive)
• I create a VirtualBox shared folder that points to the shared NTFS partition and I activate it for use with the VM running under Linux

Using the above setup email use is stable across OS hosts and VMs where the software is installed.  The only differnece (for this software) is that application presentation aspects are not retained; this occurs since the software is installed (typically) on the ‘C:’ drive which is where the application stores (remembers) it’s presentation data (i.e. which folders in the application client should remain ‘open’.)   The actual saved emails are all stored under the same logical location (the shared NTFS partition) so this is a minor item.  It could be resolved by installing the software on the ’shared’ drive, however, I found that this may cause security type access annoyances so I use the approach above instead.  Using this approach you need to use care – don’t run the same application on your host and VM while it points to the same shared data – doing so would most likely result in some data loss or other issues.

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