How do you call it to install the beta of a new operating system inside the beta of a virtual machine based on the beta of a new operating system? Yep: Stupid! So, don’t try this at home…

A couple of months ago i wrote (Sorry, German only, I didn’t translate that blog posting yet) that since VirtualBox 2.1 it is possible to run 3D applications within a virtual Microsoft Windows. Now, with VirtualBox 2.2 coming in a couple of weeks, it is possible to use 3D acceleration on Linux hosts, too! Sun publishes the Beta of VirtualBox 2.2. So if you’re interested – and don’t rely on VirtualBox – you can grep a .deb file of the current beta 2 and try the new features.

After you activated the 3D acceleration inside the settings of your virtual machine you can boot the vm. If you set the vboxvideo driver inside the /etc/X11/xorg.conf of the virtual machine, Compiz will start automatically. You can watch a small demo of Compiz running inside VirtualBox 2.2 here… (Perhaps skip the first minute)

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<br /> <div id="attachment_879" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 476px"><a href="http://christoph-langner.de/en/2009/03/compiz-und-3d-beschleunigung-in-virtualbox/"><img src="http://christoph-langner.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/video.png" alt="Please click on the image to watch the video." title="Compiz in VirtualBox" width="466" height="352" class="size-full wp-image-879" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Please click on the image to watch the video.</p></div><br />

If you don’t have flash, you can watch the ogv-Version as a alternative…

When you’ve got a fast computer with a state of the art graphics card, you will see that 3D acceleration within VirtualBox works pretty good. Compiz runs inside the virtual machine quite smooth. But with my Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS i can “feel” the limits of my hardware. Compiz runs fine, but when i activate the compiz cube it get’s significantly slow.