VirtualBox for OS/2 OSE Edition ALPHA ===================================== Version 1.5.51_OSE_27858 03.02.2008 This is an early development build of VirtualBox OSE Edition for OS/2. Please backup your data and don't expect everything to be highly polished and tuned just yet. If you find a *new* problem, meaning something not listed below, please report it at http://forums.virtualbox.org. This package is an official unofficial build of VirutalBox for OS/2. It means that it is coordinated by volunteers from innotek that are still in touch with OS/2 and keep patching VirtualBox at their spare time to make sure it runs and more or less works under OS/2. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE OS/2 HOST (AND THEREFORE THE OS/2 VERSION OF VIRTUALBOX) IS NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED BY INNOTEK! DON NOT CONTACT INNOTEK REGARDING THE OS/2 VERSION OF VIRTUALBOX NO MATTER WHAT YOUR QUESTION IS ABOUT! THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING. Current Issues / TODOs ---------------------- * FE/Qt (Qt GUI frontend): - Mouse pointer shape in mouse integration mode. - NumLock/ScrollLock synchronization. - Seamless mode (no top-level window transparency on OS/2). - Keyboard driver to intercept system key combinations (Alt+Tab etc.) * Devices: - Host Floppy/DVD. - Audio. - Host interface networking. - Internal networking. - USB proxying. * Misc: - Shared clipboard. - Starting more than one VM simultaneously. - Installer. - VMX support. - VBoxSDL (resizing/scaling/keyboard/slowness). - Very slow Resume after Pause in real mode guest applications. Also, please pay attention to the section called "OS/2 Specific Features" below. How to "Install" and Run ------------------------ 1. Unpack this archive somewhere. 2. Make sure you have a dot (.) in your LIBPATH statement in CONFIG.SYS. 3. Put the following line at the beginning of your CONFIG.SYS and reboot: DEVICE=\VBoxDrv.sys 4. Go to and run VirtualBox.exe (Qt GUI frontend). 5. Note that by default VirtualBox stores all user data in the %HOME%\.VirtualBox directory. If %HOME% is not set, it will use the :\.VirtualBox directory. In either case, you may overwrite the location of this directory using the VBOX_USER_HOME environment variable. 6. For best performance, it is recommended to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions to the guest OS. The archive containing the ISO image with Guest Additions for supported guest OSes (Windows, Linux, OS/2) is named VBoxGuestAdditions_XXXXX.zip where XXXXX is the version number (it's best if it matches the version number of this VirtualBox package). Download this ZIP from the same location you took this archive from and unpack the contents to the directory containing VirtualBox.exe. After that, you can mount the Additions ISO in the Qt GUI by selecting Devices -> Install Guest Additions... from the menu. Documentation and Support ------------------------- Please visit http://www.virtualbox.org where you can find a lot of useful information about VirtualBox. There is a Community section where you can try to request some help from other OS/2 users of VirtualBox. You can download the User Manual for the latest official release of VirtualBox using this URL: http://www.virtualbox.org/download/UserManual.pdf OS/2 Specific Features ---------------------- This section describes the features that are specific to the OS/2 version of VirtualBox and may be absent in versions for other platforms. 1. System key combinations such as Alt+Tab, Ctrl+Esc are currently always grabbed by the host and never reach the guest even when the keyboard is captured. In order to send these combinations to the guest OS, use the following shortcuts (where Host is the host key defined in the global settings dialog): Host+` (Tilde/Backquote) => Ctrl+Esc Host+1 => Alt+Tab Host+2 => Alt+Shift+Tab 2. If you use two or more keyboard layouts on the OS/2 host (e.g. English and Russian), make sure that the keyboard is switched to the English layer when you work in the VirtualBox VM console window. Otherwise, some shortcuts that involve the Host key (in particluar, all Host+ shortcuts like Host+Q) may not work. Please note that the guest keyboard layout has nothing to do with the host layout so you will still be able to switch layouts in the guest using its own means. 3. Make sure you do not do 'set LIBPATHSTRICT=T' in the environment you start VirtualBox from: it will make the VirtualBox keyboard hook screw up your host desktop (a workaround is to be found). History of Changes ------------------ * 03.02.2008 - Initial release. * XX.XX.XXXX - Fixed: VirtualBox would hang or crash frequently on SMP machines in ACPI mode. - Fixed: VBoxSDL keyboard key event to scan code conversion [contributed by Paul Smedley].