VirtualBox Info

[Jeff Lane]

On 01/25/2011 10:27 PM, rypedgenes at operamail.com wrote:
> I understand no hardware testing can be done in VM's...
> With only the /daily releases sized for a cd, I'm limited.
> So off I go...to re-install a foobar'ed daily, on my second partition!

You are correct, however don't let that stop you from testing.  There's 
no reason you couldn't test ANY of the daily ISO builds using VBox. 
While we like having the ISOs tested on as many different types of 
systems as possible, the act of ISO testing itself is valuable.  I'd be 
willing to bet that at least 75% of all installer bugs are found on VMs 
by people participating in ISO testing days.

Also, you can test any of the ISOs on your laptop directly, regardless 
of ISO size.  You can use usb-creator (it's under the 
System/Administration menu) or unetbootin to make a bootable USB stick 
from any of the ISO images.  Provided your laptop supports booting from 
USB storage (most, if not all, modern ones do) it's easy.

But like I said, do not discount the value of ISO testing on VMs.  We 
use VMs a lot for testing the installer and other bits of Ubuntu that 
aren't hardware specific.  There are just a few caveats to testing this 
way.  For example, you can't do Wubi testing in VMs.  But most other 
methods work just fine, including the rescue mode tests, as long as your 
VM's disk file is big enough to support multiple partitions.  I usually 
make mine about 22GB.

Also, depending on your laptop hardware, don't count on being able to 
run more than one at a time.  I can run 2 simultaneously, but slowly due 
to disk I/O bottlenecks, but if I put them on external storage devices 
(usb disks, I can run 3 or 4 in sync.

In fact, I've even built small clouds to do some light UEC testing in 
VMs and build development environments in VMs.

Cheers
Jeff