Virtualization As An Alternative To Dual Booting Part 3

Overview

• Article 1 covers installing and configuring my virtualization platform of choice, the Sun xVM VirtualBox.
• Article 2 covers installing Windows XP on VirtualBox and configuring system hardware and peripherals.
• Article 3 covers the pros and cons of using a virtual machine as well as for which types of projects they are suited.

Okay, virtualBox has been installed and configured, and the windows xp virtual machine is running smoothly.  Now it’s time to examine why I chose dual booting instead of virtualization.  To quickly recap, I only need windows for an art class that I am taking.  For this class I need use of my wacom intuos3 tablet and Photoshop CS3.  So let’s first look at setting up the wacom tablet on the windows xp virtual machine.

Setting Up The Wacom

After setting up access to my usb devices in the previous article, installing and configuring the wacom tablet is a rather trivial task akin to following the driver installation steps for any non-virtualized windows operating system.

1. Start VirtualBox and launch the windows xp virtual machine.

   

2. Right click the usb icon on the bottom of the virtual machine and click on the tablet device.

   

3. Download the wacom driver or insert the wacom installation cd.  Then double click the driver and begin the install.

   

4. The driver install may require a reboot.

   

5. Once windows xp restarts, the wacom should be installed and its configuration utiliities should be available from the start menu.

   

The wacom tablet works fairly well on the virtual machine.  In fact, I only experienced problems when working with large gimp and photoshop files that contained many layers.  So for most general purposes, using the wacom with photoshop and/or gimp in the virtual environment is an okay solution.  However, since I mainly work with larger files, this was kind of a deal breaker for me.  Let’s move on to my next challenge.

VirtualBox & Dual Monitor Support (Well Sort Of…)

I like using photoshop and gimp on my dual screen monitor setup.  I use my main Dell 24” widescreen flat panel monitor as my main drawing area.  My 19” widescreen flat panel serves as a utility screen where I keep my palette and other miscellaneous windows.  Using the virtualbox graphical interface, I can launch a single virtual machine window and resize it to fit my larger monitor.  But I wanted to know whether there was any way to use both monitors with virtualbox, so I read the virtualbox manual.

The bottom line is, virtualbox only supports multiple displays if you are using it as a headless server.  Once you have your virtual machine running on a headless server, you can then use remote desktop software to log into the server.  Since I have two displays, I needed to launch two instances of my remote desktop software, and each instance must state which monitor it is going to use else it will use the main monitor by default.

Although this seems pretty straightforward, implementing it caused me at least one headache!  So here is my solution.

Configuring VirtualBox For Dual Monitor Support

1. First of all, the VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol(VRDP) must be enabled.  To enable this, you go to the main virtualbox screen and click settings.

   

2. Once the settings box appears, click on Remote Display.  Then click Enable VRDP Server.  Also take note of the server port as it will be used later.

   

3. Now from the linux terminal, check to make sure VRDP is on with the following command:  VBoxManage modifyvm VMNAME -vrdpmulticon on where VMNAME is the name of the windows virtual machine.  In my case it would be winxp.

   

4. Enable multiple monitor support from the linux terminal with the following command: VBoxManage modifyvm VMNAME -monitorcount 2

   

Configuring Windows For Dual Monitor Support

After VRDP has been enabled, windows xp now needs to be configured to use dual monitors.  Windows XP can only be configured for multiple monitor support if guest additions, which were discussed in the last article, are installed.  Guest Additions provides an alternative video driver that allows windows to support multiple monitors in the virtual machine.  I believe windows xp may be the only guest operating system for which virtualbox provides multiple monitor support although it may also do this for vista now.  So assuming the guest additions package is installed, configuring dual monitors under windows xp is straightforward.  You simply need to go to the display properties menu in windows and extend the display to the second monitor and choose a screen resolution for it.  Apply the changes and shutdown the virtual machine.

Using Virtual Desktop Software To Launch Windows In Dual Display Mode

1. Ubuntu has remote desktop software installed by default.  However it is terminal-based.  I like to add a graphical frontend.  You can install grdesktop via the the synaptics package manager.

   

2. Now we need to launch virtualbox in headless server mode.  You’ll need to know the local ip address of your system.  First launch a terminal and enter the following command based on your system configuration:

   VBoxVRDP -startvm winxp 192.168.1.106

   You should get the following screen

   

3. The windows xp virtual machine is now running but we need to remotely log into it to see the desktop.  So launch 2 more linux terminals.  Then use each terminal to launch an instance of grdesktop using the following command:

   grdesktop

   

   

4. Configure each grdesktop client to connect to the headless server.  To get dual screen support, you need to specify the screen number in the domain box.  Put @1 in the domain box on the first client and @2 in the domain box on the second client.  Change the operating system to windows xp using the dropdown box in each client.

   

   

5. Each client should open its specified windows desktop screen and you should now be able to work between them like dual monitors.

   

This approach is okay, but of course it’s not quite like having use of two physical displays.  For one, each is in a windowed mode although with a little more configuration you could change to seamless mode.  A second problem with this configuration is that there is a noticeable lag when doing anything more than basic tasks.  VirtualBox can be configured to allocate more video memory and main memory, but the performance still won’t be the same as running the operating system on actual hardware because everything is going through a layer of abstraction.  So even when loading gimp or photoshop using this dual window method, I noticed even more lag time than when using virtualbox in its regular mode.  This was because the  two instances of rdesktop were sharing the already limited video memory.  As I said before, I could have changed this, but allocating more resources to the virtual machine would have started draining resources from the linux environment and slowed it down as well.  This was the second deal breaker.

The third deal breaker was simply that virtualbox doesn’t support the virtualization of firewire devices.  Linux video editing tools leave much to be desired, so one of the perks of dual booting with windows xp is that I can do better video editing.

Summary

VirtualBox is excellent when it is used for testing software, running office apps, or retouching or editing the occasional image in photoshop.  However for seriously using media applications such as photoshop, I found that it was simply easier to dual boot.  This allowed for better performance and less headaches.  As an added perk, I can also use better video editing applications.

Kim Jackson

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• Virtualization As An Alternative To Dual Booting Part 2
• Virtualization As An Alternative To Dual Booting Part 1
• How To: Dual Booting Linux & Windows On Separate Hard Drives Part 3
• How To: Dual Booting Linux & Windows On Separate Hard Drives Part 2
• How To: Dual Booting Linux & Windows On Separate Hard Drives Part 1