Over the last few days have I experimented with UEFI and GPT in VirtualBox 4.3.26. The goal was to multiboot various operating system, in this case Windows 10 Enterprise Technical Preview 9926 x64 and FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10. First, I thought of persuading the UEFI firmware to always present its boot menu. It sure beats remembering to […]

Read More → UEFI, GPT, Windows 10, FreeBSD 10, and rEFInd

VirtualBox 4.3.24 is out, so I wanted to try out the UEFI version of the latest FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10 snapshot. It didn’t go well until I realised something important, however strange it may be.

Read More → UEFI booting FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10 in VirtualBox 4.3.24

Configuring X11 is more or less a dark art, and you must almost be a wizard of the Slytherine House to get modern X.org 1.14.7 working on a FreeBSD guest in VirtualBox. Nonetheless, through lots of experimentation this evening, have I finally arrived at this configuration file: Somehow, you need both the InputClass and the […]

Read More → Configuring X.org on FreeBSD guests running in VirtualBox

Update 2014-11-30 Upgrading to Oracle VirtualBox 4.3.20 removed the timeout messages shown below. The bug was acknowledged in the change log as Storage: fixed an interrupt acknowledge issue causing hanging guests or slower I/O (4.3.18 regression) Since upgrading Oracle VirtualBox from 4.3.16 to 4.3.18 on my Windows 7 x64 host, most of my FreeBSD guests […]

Read More → VirtualBox 4.3.18 and AHCI

Strangely enough, Java Runtime Environment (JRE) fails to register javaws.exe as the handler for .jnlp files when installed in Windows 8/8.1. Just remember to choose javaws.exe, not java.exe nor javaw.exe. Further more, Blackboard Collaborate insists on using 64-bit JRE on 64-bit Windows, i.e. visit the directories and files usually found in C:\Program Files\Java, not the ones […]

Read More → Blackboard Collaborate, Java Runtime Environment, and Windows 8/8.1

I have a bunch of FreeBSD VMs running in VirtualBox. They all share a number of virtual harddrives, and among them are a virtual harddrive with the common contents of /var/db/ports. My ports configuration of emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions have the OPENGL and X11 options set. This is useless on some of my simpler VMs, as those VMs […]

Read More → Local slave port for emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions without OpenGL and X11