Celestia Forums

Has anyone tried running Celestia in a Virtual Machine?

Windows 7 Professional and above includes a license for XP Mode, which is XP running in Microsoft's Virtual PC. (You can do it in the Home editions, too, but you have to purchase an XP license.) in principle, their Virtual PC can run other operating systems, too. XP Mode's OpenGL support is, shall we say, pathetic (software emulation of OpenGL v1.1). Presumably Linux would have to use Mesa.

Oracle (previously Sun) provides a free-for-personal-use VM called VirtualBox which is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. (There are other VM vendors.) The current version of VirtualBox includes support for OpenGL v2.0, but its support for DirectX.does not yet include 3D, so most Aero features aren't available if you use it to run Windows Vista or 7.

Virtual machines provide a way tp test software without worrying about trashing the host computer. "Obviously" Celestia wouldn't do that but other packages might. In many cases, they can be an alternative to configuring a computer to dual-boot.

Well,

in fact I do build Celestia in VirtualBox VM and that is working good.
But running Celestia itself in the same VM is not as good. The graphics drivers are not really that good that you get all the eye-candy that you would get with a normal installation on a real machine. And the Qt-version went completely nuts on the VM while running smoothly on a native machine.

So, my experience is, yes, you can run Celestia in VM, but you loose the real eye-candy, ssince the graphics drivers are not as capable as the native ones.

Regards,

Guckytos

I regularly build Celestia since about three years in Virtualbox (Sun) with openSuSE as host and Win XP as guest system. I have done it frequently for Celestia-Qt using QtCreator IDE and for Celestia using VC++ 2008.

Here is a thread about it from April 2007, which seems to be forgotten.
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10994&hilit=virtualbox

Moreover, I use TightVCN to connect with my office machine from home, both for openSuSE/Windows. This is amazingly fast, virtually without visible delays.

Fridger

Guckytos,

Which version of VirtualBox are you using?
Did you install the Guest Additions?

I'm running VB 3.2.8 with a Win7 guest and getting all of the OpenGL 2.0 eye candy. Aero doesn't work, but that's a known issue: DirectX isn't fully implemented. Below is Celestia's OpenGL Info.



Both of you,
What does Celestia's cursor look like in the Guest VM ?
It's almost invisibly tiny on my system. At first I thought it was completely missing.

When I run Celestia in XP mode, the cursor looks normal.

Well, I am running VB 3.2.8 also.

Host is Fedora 13, Guest is XP SP3, and Guest Addtions are installed.

And here is what the OpenGL Info from Celestia says:


The cursor looks normal for me, fine crosshairs, but good visible.

Regards,

Guckytos