[Nix-dev] virtualbox VBoxService/modules

[David Brown]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:10:41PM +0200, Sander van der Burg - EWI wrote:

>I don't know what this module is doing different then the
>instructions on the Wiki. Is it written to fix a bug? or is it
>written to to make things more convenient?

The biggest problem is that the modules and the VBoxService should be
started, even if someone isn't running X at all.  For many
applications of VBox, installing X is overkill.

>The VirtualBox service, for instance, is started when KDE boots and
>when the VirtualBox guest additions are in environment.kdePackages .
>The only useful application I can think of right now is that a
>seperate NixOS module could make configuring the VirtualBox guest
>additions a little easier, e.g. a option that says
>services.virtualBoxGuestAdditions = true; and automatically sets the
>desired properties of a machine.

I couldn't find anything that started the service.

There are two different VBox services.  The VBoxService program has to
be run as root, and has nothing to do with an X session.  It does
things like enable time synchronization with the host.  It's important
to disable ntp, and use this, especially when running virtualbox on a
machine that can suspend.

The VBoxClient programs are part of an X session and manage the
GUI interactions with the host.  These are being started, if one is
running X.

My configuration changes probably aren't right, but something like
them is needed to start the service properly.

David