Step one is to concatenate fragmented VMWare images. This might not me necessary in your case, but we’ll do it anyway. Let’s assume the image you want to convert is called leopard-fragmented.vmdk:

Now you’re got a rather huge VMWare disk image file, and we’ll use qemu to convert it into a raw disk image:

This will take a while, and you’ll probably end up with a less-than-huge file since this is the raw file, without any fancy compression. Now you’ll want to convert this to the VirtualBox disk format, vdi:

The vdi ended up being around 7GB – more or less the exact size of the vmdk file. The temporary bin file was 32GB though. Be sure you’re got enough room on your disk for this job.

For starters, you have to find the ISO yourself – but I’ll give you a hint: look in /usr/share/virtualbox/ After mounting the ISO image, a directory popped up. I tried double clicking on autorun.sh but nothing ever comes easy, does it? I tried running it in the terminal, and was somewhat enlightened as I realized it was looking in vain for gksu – probably a Gnome frontend for su. Luckily there seemed to be another script I could run – VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run – but it whined about OpenGL direct rendering:

Before I ran the script, I made sure the newly installed CentOS was crispy by running yum upgrade. I also had a sneaking suspicion that a C compiler was required, so I made sure the system also sported gcc. The only thing I personally noticed by reading the message above, was that some missing OpenGL crap prevented the additions to be installed. As I was typing the message in this blog, I also noticed something about kernel headers. Rather embarrassing, but I really didn’t see it until now. Anyway, obviously the thing needed was kernel goodness, so I ran yum install kernel-devel. That seemed to make the VirtualBox additions script more happy and now it seems to be running flawlessly.

So, to summarize – what to do to make the damned thing work:

I rebooted as I was told to, but mouse integration didn’t seem to work. Probably due to the kernel being upgraded without rebooting and actually utilizing it. So, I ran the additions script again, rebooted again and woo – mouse integration seems to work. The clipboard doesn’t though, and the maching is still creating some really nasty spikes on my CPU graph every three seconds or so:

It’s worth mentioning that when I’m running my Windows XP guest in VirtualBox, the CPU graphs on the host system are nice and flat.

I’m not entirely pleased, but I think VirtualBox will eventually win me over from VMWare.