PC-BSD+Virtual Box on OSX Install Issues

[Laser1]

Hi-

I'm new to PC-BSD slowly transitioning over from OSX. I've tried to run either PC-PSD 8.0 RC2 or 7.1.1 in Virtual Box (3.1.2) under MacOSX to give it a good test drive but I can't get either to install and I'm not sure how to proceed.

I can get through set up and PC-BSD starts to install but the progress bar usually stops and the install reboots to the initial PC-BSD boot screen. I can however run PC-BSD if I choose to use it live.

If I watch the install screen closely, there is some early error message before the progress bar gets to 1% on the install, but I don't what it is or if it significant. The install usually fails at 4% but sometimes gets to 15% before the automatic reboot.

From what I can tell people can get PC-BSD to run in Virtual Box, but I'm not sure whether this under WIndows, Linux or OSx.

Any advice on getting this running/troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[NaX]

I don’t know if 7.x works in VirtualBox. Proper VirtualBox support in FreeBSD is a new development.

For the best info I know of on VirtualBox see:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox

You can also follow a long discussion on the mailing lists about VirtualBox.
http://lists.pcbsd.org/pipermail/testin ... 03642.html

I personally have never tried any BSD in VirtualBox yet.

[Laser1]

After skimming the mentioned sites, as far as I can tell, it looks like PC-BSD currently does not run in Virtual Box under MacOSX, at least for a person with little BSD experience, and can only be run in live mode.

That's unfortunate. I hope this can be easily fixed in the near future by either the PC-BSD, FreeBSD or Virtual Box people.

Thank you and I will continue to follow from the BSD sidelines until the situation changes or I buy a new computer.

[NaX]

I don’t know enough to comment on differences in the Mac version compared to other versions.

The one other thing to consider is your version of VirtualBox. I believe there were some issues in older version that prevented most BSD’s from working in VirtualBox.

I might be wrong, but I think to run FreeBSD in VirtualBox you need to be running at least version 3.1

[Laser1]

Hi Nax-

Thanks for the advice. I am running Virtual Box 3.1.2 but still no BSD joy.

[NaX]

I don’t know if this will help but on this page, section 3.2 there are some old instructions on instilling PCBSD in VirtualBox. The instructions should still be relevant.
http://docs.pcbsd.org/guide/

Based on this page it looks like the Mac OS X version is incomplete.
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Mac%20OS ... structions

[Laser1]

Hi NaX-

Thank you again for looking into this. The directions you link to are what I I followed as best I could and it doesn't work. I also looked at the link you gave to Virtual Box and this is for instructions for people looking to build VirtualBox into their software or as the page says building VirtualBox OSE. You are right that this aspect of Virtual Box is incomplete for OsX but I don't think this is relevant to those using the standard Virtual Box trying to run BSD.

Thank you again.