BSD Virtual Guest

Question

So I am a big fan of VMs, actually got experience enough to switch my development box to a linux distro. At this point I would like to get more experience with BSD and hope to do this with a VM. So the question I have is what configuration is correct?

BSD...

1. List item
2. FreeBSD
3. OpenBSD
4. PC-BSD (I know it is FreeBSD with a KDE, but might be simpler to get started with)

Which Virtual Machine is best for these guests (on a linux host)

1. List item
2. VMWare Workstation (have a license for 7)
3. Virtualbox 4
4. QEmu
5. Other?

Any suggestions from experts would be great. I was able to get FreeBSD and PC-BSD installed on virtualbox 4, however I get horrible resolution that I can't seem to fix.

Answer 1

I found the 'right virtual machine' requires some tinkering. VirtualBox ran Plan9 really slowly, qemu+kvm ran it hundreds of times faster. qemu+kvm also ran an Ubuntu guest at what felt like faster-than-hardware (at least for booting :) but I've read accounts from people that say the exact opposite, that VirtualBox outpaced qemu+kvm. Test them both :) that way you get the experience, and can know which one is more usable for your environments.

As for the BSDs, I ran OpenBSD for years and really liked it. You probably can't go wrong with FreeBSD. Learning both wouldn't be a bad idea -- they have different feature sets and excel at different tasks.

Don't let KDE in PC-BSD sway you too much, the different KDE things ought to be available in all their ports trees. Or try life without KDE or Gnome for a while.

Answer 2

I run FreeBSD 8-STABLE guests in VirtualBox 4.0.4, running on Windows (XP & 7) systems. It works, but there are some caveats. Seamless mode (which you might use with Linuxen) doesn't work, and it takes some configuring to get things set up exactly right. See http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox for the settings you need.

I played with virtualized PC-BSD, and it worked about the same as FreeBSD, since it is FreeBSD. PC-BSD has some nice features for the newbie to take some of the pain out of installing software.

I have also tried NetBSD as a VirtualBox guest. It "works" (for some definitions of work), but you have to launch the VM with something along the line of "vboxsdl.exe --nopatm --startvm [machine]". This worked for me on one Windows box but not on another. I didn't get around to seeing if X works.

I have not tried OpenBSD, but I seem to recall there being images out there, so it should work to some degree.

I don't have experience with other virtualization software, so can't help you there.