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VirtualBox in Fedora 13 (64bit)

Time and again I find that I develop a new website using my Fedora box and Chrome/FireFox browsers only to find that a check with IE produces some problems with layouts due to IE handling of css etc.

Best solution? Rather than borrowing my partners machine all the time I figure I should be using virtualisation to run Windows XP instances on my machine to test webapps.

To do this you (obviously) need a windows licence appropriate for which ever flavour of windows you are going to use. 

I have a .vdi file that represents a basic XP installation I just need to get it running on this machine (since formatting). So first up I have to get VirtualBox installed....

Oracle kindly provide a yum repo to enable easy install and updates of VirtualBox on rpm based machines. To make use of that we have to create a virtualbox repo file.

[root@bigfoot yum.repos.d]# pwd
/etc/yum.repos.d
[root@bigfoot yum.repos.d]# cat virtualbox.repo 
[virtualbox]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch - VirtualBox
baseurl=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/$releasever/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc
[root@bigfoot yum.repos.d]# 


Now it's easy to install VirtualBox using yum. A bit of "yum provides" searching of repos reveals the appropriate package to install:
[root@bigfoot yum.repos.d]# yum install VirtualBox-3.2
There we have it.
How I love the package management systems of Linux for installing stuff!
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