Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

If you’ve used Linux for any length of time, odds are pretty good that you’ve at least tried out some type of emulation software, such as VirtualBox.  VirtualBox allows you to create virtual “computers” on your hard drive, which can be used to try out new operating systems, audition potentially dangerous program, and more.

A Linux user who needs Windows for a single program (for work or school), could use VirtualBox to install Windows and that program.  To use it, VirtualBox simply needs to be launched, then Windows launched from inside it.  A new window appears, the user will see the typical Windows boot process, and in the end, Windows will be running inside of Linux.

It’s a nice system, and if the physical computer has enough power (both in processing and in RAM), then everything goes smoothly.  The only bottleneck, really, is that it can be a bit of a pain to first launch VirtualBox, wait for it to load, select the virtual computer you want to boot up, and finally wait for it to launch.  The subject of this article, an Indicator Applet called Indicator-Virtualbox, that’s simply not a problem.

To install it in Ubuntu, first open a Terminal.

Then type the following, as a single command:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:michael-astrapi/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install indicator-virtualbox

This will add the PPA (personal package archive), update the software lists, and finally install the indicator-virtualbox package.

To launch it, simply find the new entry in the Applications menu, under System Tools.

As Indicator-Virtualbox loads, it creates a new icon in the notification area (or uses the Indicator Applet framework if present).  Clicking the icon reveals a list of all the virtual machines currently available in VirtualBox.

As you can see, the listings at the top of the menu are identical to the listings found in the left sidebar of the VirtualBox client.

To boot up one of the virtual machines, all the user needs to do is click the listing in the Indicator-Virtualbox menu.  This is the same as highlighting the listing in VirtualBox and clicking the Start button.  Instead of needing to open VirtualBox first, however, all you need is to access the option in the menu.  Soon, the virtual machine will boot, and you’ll see the process in a new window.

It’s a simple program, only mirroring what’s already available in the actual VirtualBox program (which obviously needs to be installed for this to work), but it is a time saver.  The only real drawback with it, at the moment, is that the menu listings appear to only change when Indicator-Virtualbox is started, which likely only happens when the computer boots, or when the Panel needs to restart for some reason.

This means that if the user starts VirtualBox while Indicator-Virtualbox is running, then creates a handful of new virtual machines, they’ll only appear in the Indicator menu on restart, and not as they’re being created.  Still, it’s a tiny quibble, and in spite of it, Indicator-Virtualbox is a very valuable time-saver.