Installing Ubuntu in VirtualBox

These steps are for OSX Leopard as a host, Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) netinstall.

* Don't use the default network adapter. Use the Intel one instead.
* I set the partition manually to just have one big partition, ext2. No swap partition was set up because a) I have enough memory allocated, b) I can always set up a swapfile, c) having a swap partition increases the disk image file size,
* gksu, make, and linux-headers-generic are required to install guest additions.
* The video driver was giving me problems. Installing the guest additions with xserver-xorg-video-vesa alone did not work for me. I've narrowed it down to either xserver-xorg-video-vmware, xserver-xorg-video-fbdev, linux-headers-virtual, or a combination thereof. Afterwards I've removed all but xserver-xorg-video-fbdev and things are still working.
* localepurge and debfoster are your friends when minimizing the disk image size.

Installing FreeBSD on Parallels: Corrections

Use pcm0 for the mouse driver

That should say use psm0.

The 5GB installation size is probably due to fragmentation on the image. Not much I can do about it - Parallels Tools offers disk compression on Windows, but not on FreeBSD. I did save some space by taking a snapshot of the powered-off machine so that Parallels does not have to store the RAM contents.

I got rid of everything Gnome, including `gdm'. I've tried `slim', a shiny and minimalistic alternative. Barfed on me, gave up and decided to stick with startx. I found out though that xorg does not like the .xsession file. Linking .xinitrc to it did the trick though.