Backtrack4 Very Slow In Ubuntu 10.04 Using Virtualbox

[stanni]

Hi guys,

I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 64bit on my host machine. I've installed BackTrack 4 within VirtualBox and it boots and runs suspiciously slow. The boot time is roughly 3 minutes. The specification of the host machine is 2.1GHz dual core AMD 64 processor, 3 gigs of ram and Nvidia GTS 250 GPU. I've assigned 1 gig of ram to BackTrack which should be enough.

I've tried numerous Google searches to find other people with the same or similar problem but to no avail. Would the problem be that I'm using a 32 bit guest on a 64 bit host maybe? I've ran BackTrack with VirtualBox before inside Windows 7 and it has run much better.

If you need more information about my set-up just ask :)

[exeption]

Why not running dual boot with BT and Ubuntu?

Personally I have allways windows 7 and ubuntu on my laptops

[stanni]

Why not running dual boot with BT and Ubuntu?

For the ease of use basically. It's much easier to boot BackTrack in your main OS than having to reboot into each other every time you want to switch.

[exeption]

For the ease of use basically. It's much easier to boot BackTrack in your main OS than having to reboot into each other every time you want to switch.

I see your point, but do not agree since I use either linux or windows seperatly for obvious reasons.

With that said, a 64bit windows platform does run both 64 and 32bit at the same time, this is

pure end user friendly due to the lack of programs that are made just for 64bit environment.

So with that in mind, there should not be any reason for the slow speeds in VM due to 32bit and 64bit as

VM cannot transform 32 bit into 64bit. VM ware is also an 32bit platform if I remember correctly.

Anyway, there is no reason for the slow speed as windows 7 64bit does handle all 32bit as 32bit.

You might want to check your settings in VMware

Edited July 15, 2010 by exeption

[Infiltrator]

I don't know if virtual box has a setting that will allow you to take advantage of more than one CPU core. I know that VMware does. You might want to check this option out.

Whether you are using x32 bit version of the Virtualbox or not that should not affect the performance.

You could give the x64 bit version of VMware or Virtualbox a try to see if that yields any performance.

However I still think you should increase your physical ram a little bit, because 3gigs doesn't seem enough, to run a guest and host at the same time.

By the way what host OS are you running?

Edited July 15, 2010 by Infiltrator

[stanni]

I don't know if virtual box has a setting that will allow you to take advantage of more than one CPU core. I know that VMware does. You might want to check this option out.

Whether you are using x32 bit version of the Virtualbox or not that should not affect the performance.

You could give the x64 bit version of VMware or Virtualbox a try to see if that yields any performance.

However I still think you should increase your physical ram a little bit, because 3gigs doesn't seem enough, to run a guest and host at the same time.

By the way what host OS are you running?

As I said I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 64bit as my host OS and I seem to have fixed my problem. Turning on AMD-Virtualization in my hosts BIOS settings seems to have done the trick.

Thanks for the input you both gave.