I wanted to run Linux on my Mac laptop, but didn't want to pay $80 for VMWare Fusion if I could avoid it. It turns out, I could! I'm not actually done installing Linux yet, but VirtualBox seems pretty nice so far.
I wouldn't bother, since Mac OSX is a Unix variant, but I recently got the hankering to run my Lispworks for Linux on my laptop, so that's what this is about.
Update: Finished installing Linux with KDE. Worked out of the box. Currently running konsole exported to the regular Mac X11 server.
Update 2: Hit a bit of a speed-bump on VirtualBox: networking. The default NAT networking is great: it will take packets from the guest and put them on the host's network. But ... what if you're currently unplugged? Then your machine has no network, and no IP address. Sure, your guest can't get to the outside world, but here's the thing: It can't get to your host, either.
So, try bridged networking. As near as I can tell, the network you're bridging to has to be up and active.
Then there's host-only networking. The guest can talk to the host even if the host is not currently attached to a larger network ... but even if it is, the guest can't talk to said larger network.
You can switch between the two, but only if you reboot the VM.
I shall attempt to enquire at the VirtualBox forum.
Update 3: While typing in my question at the VirtualBox forum, I thought of a possible solution, which I tried and it works: Add a 2nd NIC to the guest. One NIC is NAT'ed to the outside world, the other uses "host-only" networking to talk to the host. Still curious if there's a better way, though. My VB forum question here.
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