VirtualBox.

After having a spot of bother with Qemu and on the recommendation of a fellow geek, I considered switching to Virtual box. The 64 bit version of VirtualBox is labeled as being for AMD processors. Therefore I opted for the 32 bit version. When I tried to install it with 'yum localinstall VirtualBox-2.0.4_38406_fedora9-1.i386.rpm' ,  yum wanted to get another 78MB of downloads. They were mostly 32 bit libraries for this and that. I wasn't keen to have such a mix and match. I have already burnt my fingers one by mixing 32 bit and 64 libraries. At this point, I decided , heck with the AMD label and downloaded the 64 bit version. However Yum refused to it install it.

Package VirtualBox-2.0.4_38406_fedora9-1.x86_64.rpm is not signed

That reluctance has nothing to do with processor incompatibilities but simply because it wasn't signed. The 64 bit RPM didn't have any dependencies so I could by itnore yum and install it using rpm the old fashioned way. Even then it wasn't without difficulty

chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox' chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxSDL' chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxHeadless' chcon: can't apply partial context to unlabeled file `/usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxwebsrv'

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

With these being warnings and not errors (caused by SELinux being disabled apparently. What sane man uses SElinux?), I reckoned that I should be able to carry on. Well not exactly. After launching Applications->System Tools->Sun xVM VirtualBox it failed on the registration step. It's rarely that open source software has to be registered but Sun is a pretty weird company. And their weird registration dialog wouldn't go away. So I killed it. Rather than going through the process of creating yet another guest OS installation, I thought of trying to import one of the existing Qemu images. VirtualBox didn't like it. Bit strage really since the 'about us' says that Virtualbox uses components from Qemu. Documentation at first glance appears to be a bit sparse (no man page). What they have is a CHM help system. That didn't help me to figure out how to import a Qemu image. I learnt it by looking at the image types supported by both virtualization system and using qemu-img to do the conversion.