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windows-installervirtualboxproject-open

Include VirtualBox as part of a Windows installer?

I'm the founder of ]project-open[, an open-source project management application similar to Microsoft Project Server. While ]project-open[ mainly runs on Linux, we had to maintain a separate Windows installer for the last 10 years. Now we think about creating a Windows installer that would contain both VirtualBox and a Linux image, but invisible to the Windows users. The installer would finally start a browser inside the VM.

I've seen that "LeapDroid" and "Browser in the Box" both use VirtualBox as part of their architecture, so including VirtualBox is apparently possible. The question is how much work it is. What is the best way to do this?

  • List item I've checked Google for "silent" or "unattended" VirtualBox installations, but it seems that non of them are really silent.
  • Compiling VirtualBox from scratch seems possible, but seems to be a lot of work.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Solution

  • I have extensive experiences on building VirtualBox on Windows, as I have built VMLite (http://www.vmlite.com) and Leapdroid (http://www.leapdroid.com), it's quite involving to maintain a separate build from the source code. So for your purpose, I recommend you to use the unmodified VirtualBox binaries, and use OVA to important your linux vm.

    If you do want to build from source code, you need to change UUID for those COM interfaces in order to run side by side along with VirtualBox.