VirtualBox

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Oracle

Free

Sun Microsystems, and now Oracle, provide VirtualBox- an awesome piece of software to run other operating systems at the same time as your primary system. Available on more platforms than any other virtual machine software, VirtualBox works just great and comes in open source and proprietary versions, but both are free.

As I’ve noted before, I use virtual machines often, mostly to test websites on other platforms. In my experience, it doesn’t work so well for games and such. You are literally using a chunk of memory and CPU resources to run another whole operating system, so don’t do this on a machine that’s only so-so.

The open source version was included but I opted for the proprietary version at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads. I know that the proprietary version has some better USB support, but I suspect I would have had less trouble with the package that came with openSUSE. There’s a kernel module that has to be compiled and if you install the proprietary package that’s up to you. I stress that all the work below is for the proprietary VirtualBox package

Installing

To, install in openSUSE you’ll also need to add

su -c "zypper install pam-devel kernel-source kernel-desktop-devel"

I left out the kernel-desktop-devel package and got errors like
no symbol version for module_layout. Thanks to notes online, I was able to fix things.

Go to your /usr/src/linux and as root run

make oldconfig && make prepare

Thanks to http://folk.uio.no/oeysteio/orinoco-usb/building.html for helping me out of the error /bin/sh: scripts/genksyms/genksyms: No such file or directory:

make prepare scripts

Then

/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Also, make sure your user account is part of the vbox group. I believe you’ll need to logout and back in to activate that privilege.