[vbox-dev] issues with blackPanter OS as guest OS in VirtualBox and suggested solution

[Kalogrianitis Socratis]

I'm not a developer nor do I work for the VirtualBox team either, but I believe that the developers include the most common distributions. It has nothing to do with countries, origins, ethnicity, funding or anything other than popularity and variety. And sometimes not even that, it's more of an architectural differences that necessitate the inclusion of a distro or not.

For example, one of the *most* common Linux distributions out there, Mint #1 in Distro Watch, is not listed *at all* as a VirtualBox option. Why? Because it's an Ubuntu fork. And you get the same exactly setup if you select Ubuntu as your template. And that's what you do. For BlackPanther, from what I read, you should select Mandriva, but you could easily educate your users about that.

Given the fact that BlackPanther is now listed as #188 in the Distro Watch site (http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=BlackPanther), I'd say the chances of it being included are not that high, but I'm not making that decision. Can you imagine what would happen if you had 200 or more options for selecting an operating system? I (as a user) would be really, really confused.

@Stéphane
The selection is definitely more than an icon. Just take a look at https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/NetworkServices/DHCP/Config.cpp to see what constitutes a template. Besides the changes in the original template setup, there are also run-time options that modify/change/alter the behavior of the VM. A lot... I'm talking booting vs. not booting if you select the wrong template/version.

@Gabor
If you submit a patch, make sure it also has its own icon, otherwise it's not a complete  patch. Although I wouldn't keep my hopes too high ;)


Socratis


On 5/Μαρ/2017, at 20:45, Stéphane Charette <stephanecharette at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 10:26 AM, Gábor Tóth-Czeper <tcgabor at blackpantheros.eu> wrote:
> Hi Stephane,
> 
> Glad you looked it up. BlackPanther OS is 'the' Hungarian Linux distribution, the other two being virtually non-existent  (Sulix, a state-donated OS that was developed as part of an educational project, similarly to UHU Linux).
> 
> BlackPanther OS takes pride in being in existence for 15 years without capital injections and state support. We would like to get officially listed in virtualbox as a guest os and to that end would like to offer our support by uploading the patch I wrote about in my email.
> 
> I would like to ask for your kind assistance in facilitating this motion and please get back to me with some substantive and material information regarding the matter, if possible.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Gabor
> 
> 
> (Please reply to the mail list, not only to me privately.)
> 
> I'm not a VB developer, nor do I work for Oracle.
> 
> I thought the guest os selection is used to decide what logo to show in the VB window, and determine some of the defaults such as memory size and disk size to use when creating a new VM.  It doesn't impact how a VM runs.
> 
> So if you choose something like "Ubuntu" or other decent linux distro, and your BlackPanther linux guest is experiencing errors, then adding an icon for it in VB wont solve the errors.
> 
> Stéphane
> _______________________________________________
> vbox-dev mailing list
> vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
> https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev