I recently installed Ubuntu as the main desktop OS on my home pc. There are a few apps that I still use in Windows, so I also installed XP as a guest OS using VirtualBox. In the past I wasn’t impressed when I tried using VirtualBox on top of Windows, but it works really well on top of Ubuntu.

All was well and good until I tried using the XP installation over the remote VNC Ubuntu desktop. To be quite honest, I think VNC sucks compared to terminal services. To be fair, I’m using it over a 10M/768k cable connection as opposed to a LAN. I don’t think VNC was designed for low-bandwidth situations. I use an OpenSSH tunnel for connectivity, and rarely if ever have had lag issues while controlling my Windows PC via RDP, even with full color settings. In VNC, I have to set it to 64-colors to get even subpar performance. So rather than use VNC, I’ve decided instead to use the remote desktop services of the Windows guest OS.

By default, VirtualBox uses a NAT configuration for the networking. The guest OS gets a private IP address that is separate from the rest of the real/physical network. It also supports bridged networking, where the guest OS shares the same NIC as the host. However, I initially had a hard time finding information on how to get this to work. When I selected “bridged” for the network configuration, I was greeted with the following error message upon starting my VPC:

Unknown error creating VM (VERR_HOSTIF_INIT_FAILED)

There was one post on the Ubuntu forums that showed me how to set up bridged networking and get everything working perfectly. It’s one of those instances where you just follow the instructions exactly and it works.

HOWTO: Seamless MS Windows in Edgy with VirtualBox and Beryl!

I followed all of the instructions in Step 2, and specified “tap0″ in the network configuration in VirtualBox. Ta da! My xp OS now has a separate IP on my LAN and I can access it’s services without any hassle.