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Saturday Jul 26, 2008

VirtualBox on Solaris

To implement a SunRay demo with a Windows Terminal Server back-end, normally we use two separate servers. But now, with virtualization all around us, why not put those two components on a single box. Of course, there are many ways to skin the cat. I decided to take the X4100 that I had in the lab, put Solaris 10u4 on it, then install Sun Ray Server Software (SRSS) and finally install VirtualBox with a Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition guest server for the backend.

However, this entry is not about Sun Ray or Windows, but about VirtualBox. When selecting the correct download, it was a bit unclear if there were separate versions for Open Solaris versus normal Solaris, or that it was all "one and the same". To jump couple of steps ahead, there is only one version, but it is clear that the developers of VirtualBox are doing their work with OpenSolaris and then expect it to work with regular Solaris as well.

Well, as I discovered, and with me many others, that doesn't always work out. The pkgadd is straight forward and without problems. At the end you will have VirtualBox in your path and you're ready to fire it up. But then I got the following error

bash-3.00# VirtualBox
ld.so.1: VirtualBox: fatal: libGL.so: open failed: No such file or directory

Things like this have happened before, and my usual solution is "let's Google". In this case that was the wrong thing to do, :) because I got soooo many wrong suggestions. In some forum I read that something is wrong with the service "svc:/application/opengl/ogl-select:default" or that you have to install the package "sunwcslr". In my case, none of this was true.

I'm sure that most of the problem is related to the difference between 32 and 64 bit systems. Not only the CPU, but also the OS and therefore the libraries must be matching. With my X4100, I was running a 64 bit AMD Opteron. I had installed Solaris running in 64 bit mode and I hadn't made the mistake of downloading the 32 bit version of VirtualBox.

Here's some commands you can use to verify your own configuration regarding these issues.

bash-3.00# uname -a
SunOS java3 5.10 Generic_120012-14 i86pc i386 i86pc

bash-3.00# ls VirtualBox*
VirtualBox-1.6.2-SunOS-amd64-r31466.pkg
VirtualBox-1.6.2-SunOS_amd64.tar.gz
VirtualBoxKern-1.6.2-SunOS-r31466.pkg

bash-3.00# isainfo -k
amd64

bash-3.00# which VirtualBox
/usr/bin/VirtualBox

This looks good, 64 bits all where it matters. But why are things still going wrong when you start VirtualBox. No matter what all the other forum messages are saying, in my case it was in the end simply a matter of not finding the 64 bit version of libGL.so. I tried many other things first, but what solved it was setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include "/usr/X11/lib/mesa/64".

bash-3.00# VirtualBox
ld.so.1: VirtualBox: fatal: libGL.so: open failed: No such file or directory
Killed
bash-3.00# echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH

bash-3.00# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:/usr/lib/64:/usr/X11/lib/mesa/64
bash-3.00# echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
/lib:/usr/lib/64:/usr/X11/lib/mesa/64

bash-3.00# VirtualBox
^C
bash-3.00#

Which shows what went wrong and how it can be fixed.

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