Jolicloud and ubuntu netbook remix are minimal linux distributions designed to run on netbooks. Netbooks don’t have CDROMs but can boot from USB. VirtualBox doesn’t support booting from USB, but can boot from CDROM. I am running Alpha 2 of Jolicloud and wanted to install it in VirtualBox before I put it onto any real silicon, but since VB doesn’t have USB BIOS support, I quickly ran into a hurdle. I figured the easiest way around this little problem was to simply create a VB disk image (vdi), write the jolicloud boot image to that vdi and just boot it that way. Fortunately, this turns out to be a simple one liner. Substitute the correct path if you are on a linux host.
“C:\Program Files\Sun\xVM\VirtualBox\vboxmanage” convertfromraw jolicloud-robby-alpha2b-live.img jolly.vdi
When that finishes, you will have a 600MB file called jolly.vdi. Just add that to VBs disk manager as the primary drive in a new VM, add another disk as a secondary drive and install away!
