VirtualBox and test releases

[Andre Robatino]

Claude Jones <cjoneslists <at> tehogeeservices.com> writes:

> I'm trying to test Fedora 17 RC4 in a Virtual Box environment. I had 
> problems doing this with F16 as well. It is up and running, but 
> tortuously slow. I noticed that it complained when I was installing the 
> guest additions about the 'experimental x' version. Every aspect of what 
> I do is slow; bootup takes many minutes, logging in takes over a couple 
> of minutes, opening windows or programs, everything. I'm running the 
> latest version of VirtualBox from Oracle on a Win7 machine with an i5 
> CPU and 4 GB of ram. I've allocated 2 GB to the Fedora VM. Does anyone 
> else have this problem?

Yes, for me with VirtualBox 4.1.8, the F15 and F16 guests are reasonably fast,
but the F17 and Rawhide guests are very slow. I get gnome shell using hardware
passthrough on the F15 and F16 guests, but am unsure whether that's the case on
the F17 and Rawhide guests, or if it's using software rendering. Presumably
hardware passthrough would be faster.

I also found that building the Guest Additions automatically using dkms as
described in

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#idp11277648

works in F15 and F16 but not in F17 or Rawhide, so I have to do it manually
there. If you get an error building the OpenGL extensions, you can work around
that by issuing the command

export MAKE='/usr/bin/gmake -i'

before installing the Guest Additions.