Sun Microsystems 3.0.0 user manual Audio settings, Network settings

3 Starting out with VirtualBox

Note: The identification string of the drive provided to the guest (which, in the guest, would be displayed by configuration tools such as the Windows Device Manager) is always “VBOX CD-ROM”, irrespective of the current con- figuration of the virtual drive. This is to prevent hardware detection from being triggered in the guest operating system every time the configuration is changed.

Using the host drive normally provides a read-only drive to the guest. As an ex- perimental feature (which currently works for data only, audio is not supported), it is possible to give the guest access to the CD/DVD writing features of the host drive (if available):

VBoxManage modifyvm <vmname> --dvdpassthrough on

See also chapter 8.5, VBoxManage modifyvm, page 107.

This deliberately does not pass through really all commands. Unsafe commands (such as updating the drive firmware) are blocked.

3.7.6 Audio settings

The “Audio” section in a virtual machine’s Settings window determines whether the VM will see a sound card connected, and whether the audio output should be heard on the host system.

If audio is enabled for a guest, you can choose between the emulation of an Intel AC’97 controller or a SoundBlaster 16 card. In any case, you can select what audio driver VirtualBox will use on the host.

On a Linux host, depending on your host configuration, you can also select between the OSS, ALSA or the PulseAudio subsystem. On newer Linux distributions (Fedora 8 and above, Ubuntu 8.04 and above) the PulseAudio subsystem should be preferred.

3.7.7 Network settings

The “Network” section in a virtual machine’s Settings window allows you to configure how VirtualBox presents virtual network cards to your VM, and how they operate.

When you first create a virtual machine, VirtualBox by default enables one virtual network card and selects the “Network Address Translation” (NAT) mode for it. This way the guest can connect to the outside world using the host’s networking and the outside world can connect to services on the guest which you choose to make visible outside of the virtual machine.

Note: If you are installing Windows Vista in a virtual machine, you will proba- bly have no networking initially. See chapter 4.2.5, Windows Vista networking, page 64 for instructions how to solve this problem.

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