Friday, March 15, 2013

Oracle VirtualBox looked good … until I tried installing it …

I love the fact that it is free. I love that fact that it can run MAC OS X inside Windows. It all seemed really great, until I tried installing it.

It blasted through the installation in seconds to this point:

image

Then two things happened. It slowed to an absolute crawl, writing drips of data onto my SSD at the speed of a floppy drive running at 0K (I assume that to be very slowly, if at all :-) … and I immediately started getting DNS failures.

Coincidence?

Well, how can I know with the new king of sleazeware at the party?

So I cancelled the installation and it hung – with my network down. My laptop sits beside it and continues to work just fine. My home machine can no longer even connect to my router. I had to kill the VirtualBox install half a dozen times before it would go away. And it left my machine lying on the floor with a sucking wound in the chest, figuratively speaking.

I will save this post and reboot my machine, which involves suspending all my virtual machines (running in VMWare, which is well behaved, obviously unlike anything distributed by ORACLE it would seem …)

…. …. …. ……….

I’m back, and my network is alive again. Thanks for nothing, ORACLE.