Trying out Puppy in virtualbox

[dr_willis]

Starting up a thread to help beginners get puppy going inside virtualbox. Theres a few things to watch out for, and a few tips that make it work much better.

Note: THIS is on running puppy INSIDE virtualbox on windows or Linux.
NOT about getting virtualbox running INSIDE puppy.

(quick summary of what i normally do)

#1 - Install virtualbox. when in doubt - get the latest.
#2 - Get a puppy linux iso file.
#3 - Fire up virtualbox and follow the wizard.

Settings to normally use.
Defaults for most things, however you may want to enable a sound card, and on linux you may want to use 'nat' for the network card settings.

On a linux box (ubuntu 9.04) i am using
Base Memory : 128mb or more if you can spare it. I have 4gb ram. so i give puppy 512mb

Video Memory 8mb. (or more if you can spare it)
Cpu Settings : Depends on your machine

3d Acceleration: Enabled.

** No idea if this helps ** but i enabled it anyway


Audio : Pulse Audio/ICH AC97 and it works fine.
Network Adaptor: PCnet-PCII (NAT)

SHARED FOLDER FEATURE (This often gets overlooked)
You can share a folder on your 'host' machine easially with the virtualbox guest machine . I normally share one called 'vboxshare' This folder will be mountable once you get the virtualbox guest addations installed. (which we will do a little later in this doc)

so i share '/home/willis/vboxshare' On windows I share C:/vboxshare

Hard Drive. - Whatever size you want. If you want to test/play with the actual installing of puppy linux a few 100mb will do. I always set it to be about 1gb in size.

Thats it for the 'setup' be sure to mount the puppy iso file in the virtual cdrom drive and boot that puppy up!.

it 'should' boot up to the puppy questions in about 20 sec. Answer them how you like.

usb mouse, whatever language/layout you use.

SELECT XVESA FOR THE X DRIVER

Otherwise you get a black screen and have to reboot the virtualbox machine.

If all goes right. you should see a puppy desktop, and hear the woof woof! Now you can toy with Puppy.


Now that you have it going, Do you wish to do a hard drive install? Great You can toy with the installer all you want and not break anything.

Note: i do not do a 'click by click/dialog by dialog tutorial here' its best that you look/read/think and apply the hints i am giving.

If i figure out how i may make a video of a quick install like i am doing here.

Frugal Install under virtualbox. (why not a full? I have no idea, i always do frugals)

#1 - Partition the hard drive how you want. This is your 'virtual hard drive' so you really cant mess things up too badly.

Menu -> system -> gparted partition manager.

dialog box pops up mentioning the sda internal drive 'ATA VBOX HARDDISK'

The default hard drive should be '/dev/sda'

Now you can toy with gparted and set up some partitions. Since this is a virtual hard drive you dont have to worry about messing things up, and you can learn the ins and outs of gparted.

Dont forget to use the 'apply' button to actually do your changes to the hard disk.

So for now - make a primary partition at the start of the hard drive of ext2, and a smaller swap partition at the end.

I used 800mb for / and 256mb for the swap. Your numbers will vary depending on the size of your virtual drive. Be sure to tell gparted to format the partitions, and apply the changes. There you go - hard drives all formated. Now time to do the actual install.

Menu -> setup -> Puppy universial Installer

You wish to use the 'Internal (IDE or SATA hard drive)'
install puppy to 'sda'
I always do a 'frugal' install. Im not even sure why one needs to do a full install.

Also i normally install to the 'puppy420' directory - to keep things neat.
Wait patiently as the files install.

Now comes up the 'tricky' part. READ the rather large dialog box that comes up after its done copying. Note that it says it put a file

/tmp/NEWGRUBTEXT that has the proper GRUB menu entry in it for your system. This will save you some typing later.

You get "OK all Done" - well the sytem is installed. but NOT THE BOOT LOADER. We will set up GRUB now.

You can always just use the CD to boot the system. Using grub (detailed below will make it a little faster and easier, but is not that big a deal when using virtualbox)


#1 - backup that /tmp/NEWGRUBTEXT to the hard drive.

( this is not needed, but its saved me a lot of typing trying to restore grub in the past, and if you decide to not install grub now and use the cd to boot, it will be handy if you ever decide to install grub later. If nothing else its worth remebering that the installer DOES make this file for you to look at for an example on other installs)


Use the mount Icon on the desktop. to mount the hard drive. 'sda1'

You should see it in the file manager, with 2 directories, 'lost+found' and 'puppy420'

Now copy that /tmp/NEWGRUBTEXT to sda1, so you have it in case you need to refer to it. (I like redundant backups) Either use the file manager. or use the console icon and at the terminal window use the command.

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cp /tmp/NEWGRUBTEXT  /mnt/sda1

Now Close the file manager window, and close the terminal window. and UNMOUNT the hard drive using the Mount tool, and the 'unmt' button.


If anything else is accessing the hard drive You may need to use the 'kill' feature to force the drive to get unmounted.

If the grub installer still rants about it being mounted you may need to open a console and use the 'umount /dev/sda1' command

I am tempted to just not even include this 'Backup the NEWGRUBTEXT' paragraph. but Often its just SOO handy to have that file on the hard drive for system recovery.

If all else fails, you can always follow the installer guide i have given and just dont backup the NEWGRUBTEXT to the hard drive. dont mount it, dont worry about it. Providing you dont reboot after doing the install NEWGRUBTEXT will be in /tmp

The grub installer is a little 'picky' about installing to a hard drive if its already mounted. I dont know if this is by design, or a bug that just gets overlooked. I have no idea why i have to unmount the thing to just have it get remounted by the installer. It would be nice if i could just tell the installer to use /mnt/sda1 instead of /dev/sda1
(rant over)


2) We are now ready to actually install grub.

Now to do the actual installing of GRUB.

menu -> system -> Grub Bootloader Config.


Just to get the thing going. i use the following options..

Simple, Standard,

Where Do you want the GRUB files. You want them on /dev/sda1

Now, you have the option of 'Select Grub Destination'
Root, Floppy, or MBR.

The Dialog box seems to imply that MBR needs extra work and is dangerout.. Im not sure why it says this. since it dosent seem to be accurate. I dont seem to have to set the boot flag later like the dialog implies

So I Select MBR.

Now you are ALMOST DONE...

The GRUB installer just mounted sda1, instlled the files, then unmounted it.. NOW you get to remount it! (logical eh?)
Using the mount tool, remount your hard drive. You wish to edit the boot/grub/menu.lst file

Click on that file to open it up in geany, and also in geany use the open button to open either /tmp/NEWGRUBTEXT if its still there. or /mnt/sda1/NEWGRUBTEXT , it contains 4 lines, select, and copy the text. Now back to the menu.lst tab in geany.

IF all else fails - i give an example of the NEWGRUBTEXT in the next message.

After the line

#End GRUB global section You copy/paste the 4 lines from the NEWGRUBTEXT file.

ie:

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#End GRUB Global Section

title Puppy Linux 420 frugal
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /puppy420/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd psubdir=puppy420 nosmp
initrd  /puppy420/initrd.gz

The grub entries below what we just pasted are not critical, and could be deleted if you wanted to.

Save the file. and use the menu-> Shutdown (shutdown) option.

I would not bother doing a 'save to file' at this time

when it shuts down, you wish to 'eject' the puppy cd from the virtual machine. Using the virtualbox menus, or configs or else it will boot that. and not our new installed system.

Now if every thing worked right. You start up the puppy vbox machine and it should boot up.

And you have a nice grub menu with 'Puppy 420 frugal' entry at the top.

The system will boot. and ask you the same few questions.. rember to select XVESA for the driver. (we will fix that later)

You should now be at the normal puppy desktop.

What i suggest now at this time, assuming it all worked. is reboot and make a save file, befor you start tweaking/customizing things on your new desktop. You might want to backup your virtual machine image Unless you want to go through this again. (once you figure it out, it will take you all of 10 min to do a puppy install in virtualbox, Honestly!)


So In summery, You got a basic puppy setup running inside virtualbox.
The next thing to help it run better is to install the virtual box guest add ons.
(you rebooted and made a save file right?) Now to the next step.

So configure your guest add ons.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 9&start=15 is the thread on this topic. In short..

configure your network. (makes it hard to download files otherwise)

On that thread post. the first item has links to the vbox guest pets you need.

(the following url may change if new versions come out, it may be best to recheck that thread)

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... &id=14275

Now you have the file virtualbox_guest_additions-2.1.4.pet
(version #'s may change) Click on that thing and install it, once its done.
menu -> shutdown -> reboot.


If all goes well.. You will get a dialog from virtual box about 'mouse pointer integeration' - Great! you no longer need to keep using the LEFT Control key to ungrab the mouse! and the gfx and other features are enabled.

Step 2 - will be tweaking virtualbox a little bit more for puppy.
(to be continued)

[dr_willis]

Corrections

Ok The URL stuff dont seem to be working lets try again

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 9&start=15

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... h&id=14275

[dr_willis]

I give up on URL's Now to gettting the virtualbox 'share' working properly.

Earlier we made a 'vboxshare' in the virtualbox settings. Now we are going to actually mount that 'share', note this is not a samba share, or a nfs share, it gets mounted using the special virtualbox filesystem.

So you got virtualbox going, puppy is installed, and you have the virtualbox guest addons installed. Great!

To mount your 'virtualbox share' you would use the command similer to..

mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint

Note the filesytem 'type' is vboxSF, NOT vboxFS (seems backwards to me also, and a common typo, just rember 'virtualbox shared folder' )

In this case the share name is 'vboxshare' lets mount it to a mountpoint also called 'vboxshare' in the root users home directory.

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mkdir vboxshare
mount -t vboxsf  vboxshare vboxshare

Now on the host machine, copy some files to the vboxshare directory and puppy should be able to access them, also puppy can copy files to that shared directory and the host machine can access them.


Let automate this slightly with a script

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#!/bin/sh
# Mount the vboxshare script, called mountvboxshare.sh 
mount -t vboxsf vboxshare /root/vboxshare

 

Place this script in the file 'mountvboxshare.sh' and 'chmod +x mountvboxshare.sh' to make it executable. Now put the file where you like. I just keep it in my root users directory. You could place it in your bin directory and drag it to your desktop if you like.


Thats it for my Virtualbox tips. Any further tips anyone? Yes i know this could be made into a wiki page. But ive only got 2 months off work.

[MU]

cool, thanks.
I'm too tired now, but a pet to mount the share would be great.
Until now, I copy files via FTP, what is not very comfortable.

URLs: remve the spaces, and the work.

e.f. from

Code: Select all

[url] http://

to:

Code: Select all

[url]http://

Mark

[Burn_IT]

XVesa .Otherwise you get a black screen and have to reboot the virtualbox machine.

Yes you do get a blank screen, BUT, the keyboard is still working and the machine is still running.
If you can remember/work out the correct sequence of keystrokes the screen comes back on once XORGWizard has finished and issued XWIN.

I have Puppy running seamlessly under Puppy, XP, Vista, and now Windows 7.

I also have XP running seamlessly under all the others.

Not all Pupplets will run under VirtualBox. One of the kernel versions would NOT work.

[MU]

in xorgwizard, I also got the black screen.
I then was hitting Enter 3 times or so, and X started, but with 640x480 pixel.
Another time (Puppy 4.20), the screen stayed black.
I then restarted the VM, and X started.

Now I edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf AND xorg.conf.VirtualBox_VBE_BIOS.
In BOTH files, I replace Modes 640x480 with 1024x768, and Depth 16 with 24

I also had to enlarge the monitor frequency.

The attached pet will activate xorg with 1024x768 pixels.
You can run it, while you are in xvesa.
It restarts X immedeatly after installation.

------------------------
URLs:
please change:

Code: Select all

[url]http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=14275 
[/url]

to:

Code: Select all

[url]http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=14275[/url]

Mark

[dr_willis]

So can we clarify the exact problem then? with some setups the default mode for the virtualbox guest addons is incorrect? or did i missread somthing? Just wanting to make extra extra extra clear what that pet does.

It corrects the xorg.conf to use a 1024x768?

Since this is the Beginners Help area. I just want to make it very clear for the beginners.

[dr_willis]

Toying with 'record my desktop' tool and i made a video 90mb
(almost the size of puppy!) Of me setting up virtualbox and installing
puppy in it.

http://drop.io/dr_willis

I need to find a better site to host the video.. or course i also need to shrink the video down a lot. This site even has a chat feature say Hi!

Would video tutorials of this type be in demand? They dont seem too hard to make.

[MU]

It corrects the xorg.conf to use a 1024x768?

Yes, but it replaces xorg.conf completely.
And it activates xorg if you currently use xvesa.
Mark

[gray]

Couldn't find a guest additions pet for the latest version of VBox, so I made this one for puppy 4 (kernel 2.6.25.16).

[floborg]

I think you need to have the devx SFS file installed prior to installing the guest additions. You might get errors with anything other than the Puppy 4 series.

[rft-hillview]

Hi
following the instructions in the first post and so on I got some really peculiar results. In my case it is Puppy 4.2.1 on Virtualbox 2.2.4 running on a fairly ordinary Windows XP Home installation. I did a FULL installation not a FRUGAL - this may explain what happened ?

All went well until the bit about saving /tmp/NEWGRUBTEXT - it just plain did not exist and I re-did the installation many times thinking I had messed up.

So onwards and upwards I edited the menu.lst file to get it into line with the recommendations in the earlier post. So when I boot using the new menu.lst it fails - when I choose my attempt at copying the recommended entires

In bitter frustration I tried the entry made by the Puppy and untouched by me - Hey Presto! we have a working system so the Puppy's GRUB produced a system which works without me tampering - great but I wonder if that is by design or because of some weird things I did while trying to get it to work. Right now I don't intend to upset it I would rather take it for a walk.

On that front one of the reasons I decided to play with Virtualbox was because I wanted to be able to work in Puppy on my bigger , faster PC with it's better screen and still have access to my Windows shares.

Well so far on that front no joy - although I can access the internet from the Puppy I cannot see any windows shares as Pnethood finds no shares at all despite the fact that Puppy on my laptop has no problem.

So my thanks to those who set me off in the Virtualbox direction but can anyone help me to gain access to the shares on the Windows XP which is hosting the Virtualbox on which Puppy is the guest.

[rft-hillview]

Sorry - should have all the earlier posts before any reference to shares.

More work to do .........

[rft-hillview]

Ok so having blindly loaded the virtualbox_guest_additions-2.1.4.pet and got file sharing working I am left with the questions:
1) what is this pet supposed to do?
2) It swaps me from xvesa to xorg - why is this a good thing?
3) In xorg it restricts me to 1024x768 when I want 1280x1024 or 1152x864
so I went back to xvesa without any apparent bad results or is it that I have not discovered them yet?

Of course my problem is being a new kid on the block I don't like loosing any of my marbles. If some big kid comes along and says I should give up some of them I would like to know why.

Of course I remain truly grateful to the forum and its contibuting members for all the help and assistance that I have got from trawling the pages.
I have not had so much fun for ages - so thanks

[appyface]

Thank you dr_willis for this excellent tutorial! Without this tutorial I think I still would not have Puppy Frugal booting from the Vbox hard disk with GRUB!

I'm not new to technical tasks with the PC, but my experience is all Windows. I use VBox 3.x heavily but again all are Windows OS guests. I do have some familiarity with Unix/AIX but only as a user, none from a technical/admin standpoint. So I am brand new to all things linux, and that means Puppy, GRUB, LILO, and and all the other things linux which others understand so well.

After trying Puppy in Vbox 3.x from Live CD, I installed Puppy Full into Vbox to boot from hard disk, by blindly following the installer script prompts Very nice installer script for the Full install, for the n00b! Many thanks to the authors.

Next I wanted to install Frugal version. Another very nice installer script, which by design stops short of the bootloader install. Understood, but it is just a bit too short for this n00b LOL This tutorial was just what I needed in order to finish off and boot using GRUB from Vbox hard disk. Thank you again!

Best regards,
--appyface