For those of us who don't want to pay for VMWare Fusion, or who just prefer to use Sun products, VirtualBox is a good alternative.
The general recommendations for when you are UsingVMWare applies when you are using VirtualBox as well.
Good configurations for an OpenSolaris based build machine are:
(These have been tested with a MacBook1,1 - the Intel Core Duo version, with 2GB RAM)
- Base memory: 1010MB
- Hard disk: Dynamically expanding. Size does not matter with this setting, base recommendation is 16GB.
- Network: NAT
- Shared folders: Does not work with Solaris - Use NFS instead. This page describes how to enable Mac OS X (10.4 or earlier) to be a NFS server: http://mactechnotes.blogspot.com/2005/09/mac-os-x-as-nfs-server.html.
Another option for building the JVM on a MacBook is to use a virtual Linux machine.
The same memory and network settings that are good for the OpenSolaris installation is good for Linux. But for Linux you can use Shared folders, as long as you don't use it for the build directory. Instead put your build directory in /tmp and load your source files from the shared folder. The main reason for having the build directory in the shared folder is that the shared folder file system does not allow Linux to change the file permissions.
Here are some links to setup information:
- Running OpenSolaris Using VirtualBox (Sun documentation)
- OpenSolaris on a Mac in VirtualBox (blog entry with step-by-step instructions and screen shots)
- Setting up NFS-based sharing between host and guest (VirtualBox wiki page)
(Status report, 01-2009: After spending several hours messing with my OpenSolaris VM, VirtualBox, and Google, I have not been able to find a way to reliably connect the guest as NFS client to the host as NFS server, which is the key connection in the VMWare-based development setup. I left a cry for help on the VirtualBox forums. Help? – jrose)
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