Running the MySource Mini VM with VirtualBox

If you don't have access to VMWare player to give the MySource Mini virtual machine image a try, you can use the free VirtualBox player instead. VirtualBox has the ability to use the HDD image from VMWare without the need to have VMWare installed. You do need to set a couple of options though, which I'll run you through.

The first thing you need to do is download VirtualBox. Make sure you have the latest version (I'm using 3.0.10) as I've read that older versions may not have all the options we need.

Now you want to create a new virtual machine. Give it a name (MySource Mini is fine) and it will ask you what type of OS it is. You want to pick Linux, Debian (64 bit).


You'll need to pick how much memory you want to give it. I gave mine 512MB but it doesn't really matter as you can change this later.

The next bit is the virtual hard disk. You want to use an existing hard disk. Click the icon to launch the Virtual Media Manager. Click Add and then locate the MySource Mini folder that was extracted from the MySource Mini download. Select the file MySource Mini.vmdk and then use this as hard disk for your VM.


Now you can finish creating your VM. It will appear in the VM list once it has been created, but you need to configure a few more things before you can start it up.

Select the VM and click Settings. Go to System and make sure Enable IO APIC is selected.


Now go to Storage, select Enable Additional Controller and make sure SATA (AHCI) is selected from the drop-down. In the Attachments section at the bottom, click IDE Primiary Master and select SATA Port 0 instead.


You may need to fiddle with your Network settings as well. I had to use Bridged networking for some reason, but I haven't looked into why NAT was not working for me.

If everything works, your VM will boot and entering ifconfig eth0 should show you a valid IP address you can connect to. Now you can follow the VM Quick Start guide and have your MySource Mini system up and running in a few minutes.