Booting a VirtualBox VM from removable drive without the GUI

I recently installed VirtualBox on one of my Ubuntu systems. I was intrigued by the VBoxManage command line client and was wondering if it would be possible to boot a VirtualBox VM from a removal drive entirely with a script (i.e. without the GUI).

The answer is yes. You can see the script in my google code repository (Updated to HG path).

In short, you create the VM as usual using the GUI (in theory you should be able to do that from the command line as well, but I need to work out details with the networking). Then remove the harddrive from the VM and copy the .xml and .vdi file to the removable drive. Then go ahead and remove the VM and harddrive from the GUI.

At this point you can boot the VM using something like the following:

$ vbox-add-vm.py -v -H /media/truecrypt1/VM.vdi /media/truecrypt1/VM.xml

The script will automatically register the VM and hard drive, add the hard drive to the VM, boot the VM, wait for it to shut down and then unregister everything.

The only hiccup at this point is if you have the GUI running, it seems to keep the VM open in some way that prevents you from ejecting the device.

Since I finished this script I discovered the VirtualBox SDK with Python bindings. For v2 of the script, then would be a natural thing to leverage.

Label Cloud on blog

I added a label cloud to the blog following these directions. My only change was to set minFontSize to 10.

Don't forget so save your template before you begin in case you screw up.

Getting my Wii Fit to talk to my Tomato Router

The situation: a Wii Fit and a Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL running Tomato 1.23. Every time I tried to connect the Wii Fit to my WPA2 network, I kept getting the following error:

Error Code: 51330 Unable to connect to the Internet

A quick google turned by this page which led me to start playing with by wireless and security settings. Long story short, here are the settings (under the "Basic" setup menu) I ended up with that worked for me. I'm not sure all are important, but I'm pretty sure the last two (Encryption and Security) are.

Channel 1
B/G Mode: Mixed
Encryption: TKIP/AES
Security: WPA/WPA2 Personal