As I’ve mentioned in the past, VirtualBox is my favourite of all the virtualisation tools out there. I use it to run Kubuntu on my Windows XP machine, for web development purposes.

Anyway, I have just the one “guest” machine, Kubuntu, so it seems a bit tedious to have to start VirtualBox each time. Naturally, there is another way – a command line shortcut.

Cutting to the chase, I’m assuming you know how to create a shortcut. I’ll also assume you’re using the latest version of VirtualBox. Right, here’s the shortcut…

"C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" startvm xxx

Where xxx is the name of your virtual guest.

And that’s it really. Oh, and if you want to make it pretty, I even found a Kubuntu icon to make that shortcut look even more appropriate.

There’s a facility with VirtualBox to install “Guest Additions” – various utilities for a particular OS that will enhance it’s capabilities to work with VirtualBox. Most of the other virtualisation software has its own equivalent.

However, I’ve struggled to get it work until I came across an article in PcPro (October 2007) about how to do just that. It’s for Ubuntu but works just as well for Kubuntu.

First of all mount the Guest Additions disk. Now run the following…

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux headers-`uname -r`

When that’s done you’re supposed to change to the CD rom and run the following…

sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

For some reason I can’t get to the CD Rom via the terminal program (well I could, but it said there was nothing on it). Instead I found, by more luck than judgement, that I was able to install it at root via clicking on the CD Rom icon.

Anyway it worked. Amongst other things I can now resize my Kubuntu window up to the full 1280×1024 of my monitor. I’ve also got seamless mouse use – no more using a special key to move in and out of the virtual window, back to the host. All very handy.

Lastly, the same article gave details of a useful command line program provided with VirtualBox for making clones of your virtual hard drives. The command iis in the VirtualBox folder and is…

VBoxManage clonevdi {source disk} {output file}

The source disk is the full path to where you have the virtual drive stored.

Now that Kubuntu has been upgraded from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon, it was time to re-install my copy on VirtulBox. Why re-install instead of simply upgrade? Well, I did try that but the update seemed to regularly crash. In the end I had an upgraded version of Kubuntu but it wouldn’t install and future updates. Which is obviously bad. So I decided to try afresh instead.

Now, the install is a breeze but, as before, I had 3 browsers to re-install. However, since my original instructions I’ve got it down to a more fine art. And, as before, Konqueror comes as standard with Kubuntu (hence me choosing the KDE interface).

So here are the rest…

Firefox
Go into Add/remove programs
Search for & install Firefox

Opera
Browse to http://www.opera.com/download/ and download the latest version to your desktop (it should be a .deb file)
Right click and select “Open With” followed by “Gdebi Package Installer”

SeaMonkey
This is the tougher one.
Download and install (as with Opera) the automated script.
Open up a command window and change to root
Now run the following command…

ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p seamonkey