If you want to run windows application on Linux, you have several options:

• use wine
• Install Windows in a XEN VM (with full virtualization)
• Install Windows on a VMWare VM (Server or Player)
• Install Windows in a KVM VM
• Install Windows in VirtualBox
• ???

Although wine is usually a very good choice to run Windows applications on Linux, sometimes the application you need does not run with Wine. If you already have a working XEN environment AND your hardware supports full virtualization, you can install Windows as XEN Domain. Unfortunately my hardware does not support full virtualization. After playing around with VMWare server (downoad here) I had a look at software called VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is a piece of software which you can install on top of Linux (or almost any other OS). It is easy to install, very easy to use and works almost out of the box (I like that;-)).

Here are the steps I did to install VIrtualBox on Fedora 8:

Install the latest Kernel and kernel source

It makes sense to install the latest kernel and kernel-devel first:

Install new Kernel:

 
# yum install kernel 

Check your grub.conf and make sure the new kernel is set as default. Then reboot

 
# yum install kernel-devel

Get the software

go to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads and download the appropriate package for your Linux distribution.

Install the rpm

 
# rpm -ihv VirtualBox-3.0.8_53138_fedora8-1.i386.rpm
warning: VirtualBox-3.0.8_53138_fedora8-1.i386.rpm: Header V4 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6dfbcbae
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:VirtualBox             ########################################### [100%]

Creating group 'vboxusers'. VM users must be member of that group!

No precompiled module for this kernel found -- trying to build one. Messages
emitted during module compilation will be logged to /var/log/vbox-install.log.

Compilation of the kernel module FAILED! VirtualBox will not start until this
problem is fixed. Please consult /var/log/vbox-install.log to find out why the
kernel module does not compile. Most probably the kernel sources are not found.
Install them and execute

  /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

as root.

If you have installed the latest kernel (and kernel-devel) this should not happen! If you don't want to install a newer Kernel, you can try to install one of the older builds (available here). Good luck!

Start VirtualBox

# VirtualBox

Known Problems

If you get this error message:

 
VirtualBox: supR3HardenedMainGetTrustedMain: dlopen("/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so",) failed: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so: undefined symbol: _ZN7QRegionpLERK5QRect

You should remove qt4 and qt4-x11

# yum erase qt4 qt4-x11

and then install the latest version

 
# yum install qt4 qt4-x11

Also, I had to Update qt with the following rpm's to make it work:

• qt4-4.4.3-1.fc8.i386.rpm
• qt4-x11-4.4.3-1.fc8.i386.rpm

 
# rpm -Uhv qt4-4.4.3-1.fc8.i386.rpm qt4-x11-4.4.3-1.fc8.i386.rpm   

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