Building a Virtual Box.

VirtualBox Ideal

Ok. So we have XMBC for Media Player organization, and my current flavor of Listen/Exaile/QuodLibet/Etc for Lappy music players, MythTV (in the works), and a few other things going on. What's missing?

Really? What's Missing?

If you were thinking "I wish I could watch Netflix Instantly, which is only available on Windows, you are on the same page as I am. If you were thinking about Quicken or TurboTax or some other Windows-only software, I won't hate you.

VirtualBox Basics

VirtualBox set up a virtual environment that simulates a common hardware platform, and with a lot of disk space devoted to a disk image, you can create an environment that will install and run Windows. Inside that, you can do anything on windows and it will act like you want. This includes running Internet Explorer and Netflix, Quicken, ActiveSync for your phone, and iTunes gag.

There are problems, though, and the biggest one we have is with Netflix - it simply takes up so much bandwidth, or CPU, or memory, or disk reads, that we can't get a smooth picture..... yet. We'll try to figure this out.

Installation

We're currently running VirtualBox 2.1.4 from binaries.

We downloaded the binaries from the website and installed them manually because the Ubuntu packages were out of date.

Windows

We are in the process of building a super-efficient windows binary to go very quickly. We're not there yet though, and so this section will need more data.

SATA Controller

A big recommendation was to not use the Default IDE drive support, but to use SATA. It will decrease CPU usage and increase Hard Drive writes.

Installing SATA on an existing drive

We were already running VB when we read about the SATA trick. So we had to re-adapt the current XP installation for the new SATA driver. Here's what we did.