Posts Tagged ‘VirtualBox’

Installing sound drivers for VirtualBox / Windows 7

02/06/2010

Even with the latest version of Windows 7 and VirtualBox 3.0 available, there is no sound drivers for the emulated sound card bundled, unlike in Windows XP. To enable sound in Windows 7 under VirtualBox you need to install the drivers for the sound card.

Instructions:
1) Go to RealTek’s website: http://www.realtek.com.tw/
2) Click on “Downloads”, then on “AC’97 Audio Codecs”. On the downloads page download the file with the description “Vista/Win7 (32/64 bits) Driver only (ZIP file)”.
3) Extract the file and run setup.exe. You will need to click on “Install anyway” a few times.
4) Then the device manager should refresh itself, and the sound card should be installed and working.

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Time drifting in VirtualBox RHEL/CentOS

01/13/2010

I am running VirtualBox on a Solaris 10 installation, with a CentOS 5.4 virtual machine. The problem I have had is that the time in the virtual machine has been going nuts. Sometimes it goes so slow it almost seems like time is standing still, sometimes it speeds ahead. It is so bad, that neither ntpd nor guest additions’ time sync could keep it running properly.

After googling this a lot and trying different things, I can now bring you the solution:
1) Be sure you’re running the guest os additions (same as vmware tools)
2) Add the following kernel boot parameters:
nmi_watchdog=0 elevator=deadline noapic nolapic divider=10 nolapic_timer clocksource=acpi_pm
3) Reboot, and maybe do a ntpdate one time to get it right. After that, the guest additions should keep the time up to date. Oh, and you should probably not run ntpd at the same time as the guest additions, they could get in each other’s way…

Oh, and it should be fixed in later linux-kernels, but it seems RHEL 5.x (and therefore CentOS 5.x) is stuck on kernel version 2.6.18, which means we don’t get the fix before a new major release.

Enjoy.

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